We made tons of articles talking about the HP Elite x3. It’s the Windows Phone flagship device right now, since Microsoft is rumored to halt production of Lumia devices soon. Besides the business-class design and the premium performance, HP promised that the phone could possibly have the power to run Win32 and desktop apps soon, and this now possible with the subscription-based service called HP Workspace.
Before any misunderstandings, it’s not yet possible run x86/x64 programs on ARM platforms, but HP got a way around it to make it work. The Workspace is a cloud virtualized environment that lets you use Win32 programs on your phone using Microsoft Continuum, which is pretty limited and close now (eg. no windowed apps, only UWP etc..)
The client app itself comes bundled with the phone, but you won’t be able to use it unless you pay the monthly price for one of this tiers:
- For $49 per month per user, the virtualized environment is limited to 4GB of RAM, 10 different apps and 40 hours of monthly usage.
- For $79 a month per user, you get 8GB of RAM, unlimited apps and 80 hours of monthly usage.
If you’re one of the lucky people to own one HP Elite x3, you can subcribe the service and use it within its limitation. And if you’re not, I hope you enjoyed the article.
