Have you ever been surprised with the performance of a device, that you didn’t think a lot about? The HP Tango X is one such device. When I first removed the device from its packaging, my initial thought was, “That’s it? This is a printer?”. My five-year-old looked at the printer and thought it was some kind of a gaming console.

After the initial apprehensions wore off, I got around setting up the device. Setup is quite straightforward – plug in the device, install the HP Smart app on your smartphone, and then follow the on-screen instructions. It hardly takes minutes to set this thing up.

The overall design and build quality of the Tango X very good. It comes with a linen cover (available in gray or indigo), which folds over the printer to make it look like a tiny piece of desk accessory. When the printer is closed, it measures around 15 inches wide by 9.7 inches deep and is only 3.5 inches tall. It also is featherlight – so moving it from room to room is not a hassle.

The Tango X does not come with a screen or a control panel built on top of it. So you will require a computer or a smartphone to operate it. Your PC or phone needs to run the HP Smart app before you can set up the Tango X. You will find a couple of buttons on the top panel of the printer, which is mostly used for canceling a print job, printing a status sheet, and so on.

The HP Tango X is a wireless printer – it does not connect through USB or Ethernet connections. Since the printer supports cloud-based printing and sharing, scanning and copying of documents are done through the HP Smart app. You can also print directly from your smartphone. You can either select a PDF or an online document from Google Drive or Dropbox.

The quality of the print output is very good. Text documents printed with sharp and dark letterforms. And although there was a noticeable difference when I printed from an Android phone, the difference was slight. Graphics looked very attractive, with lots of fine detail. The output was well-saturated, with natural-looking colours.

I wasn’t however happy with the overall performance of the scan and copy functions through the HP Smart app. I usually use the CamScanner app for scanning documents, which does a very good job. A couple of times we ended up with blurry images. Sometimes, the text wasn’t as sharp as we were expecting it to be.

The HP Tango X uses two cartridges for print jobs. One has black ink and the other is a tri-color cartridge with cyan, magenta, and yellow ink. The Tango X is a perfect printer for those who are only looking for a device that can deliver high-quality print jobs in a smaller package, without taking up too much desk space. But if you are also looking for flawless scan and copy functions, look elsewhere.

Price: AED 799