Fondling again: HP slates new tablet for April HP has used Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as the stage to launch into the Android tablet market, with the new Slate7, a 7-inch unit based on Android Jelly Bean 4.1. Shipping from the mobility unit headed by ex-Nokia executive Alberto Torres, who joined HP last year, the Slate7 will arrive in April (which previous …
Looks like a nice cheap tablet. Got some cool things in it. I am still surprised that even cheaper tablets don't have better front facing cams for video conferencing. Especially HP. Would rather they had the VGA looking out and 3.1mp looking in.
still... Good to see the prices continue to drop.
A real shame about the single core though. Even my android mini-pc has a dual core.
It looks like this is a cheap version of the Blackberry Playbook with a different back, poorer cameras, no magnetic charger plug, and either a slightly better or slightly worse processor depending on whether it is single or dual core.
And it will cost the same as my 64GB P/B.
Still,I expect you will be able to compromise your security by running Whatsapp on it.
This is a market HP shouldn't stay out of. I know it hasn't been long that they have been absent, but any time spent absent here, right now, is a bad move.
I'm not going to buy it, but I'm glad to see there is worthy competition to the other big players. Now, if only somehow the Chinese market could be opened up to the rest of the world.
My existing HP tablet, a firesale touchpad, is actually pretty nice. Unfortunately it suffered from a cracked case near each speaker - seems this is a common complaint - but it's still nice and responsive running CM9 and will soon be upgraded to CM10.
Hopefully they'll stay in the market this time. More players can only be good for increasing quality and lowering prices.
Only the screen is crap, the processor is crap, it's got half the storage, the manufacturer has a worse reputation, and it's 8 months later to market. And it's only $30 cheaper, and Google will probably have room to cut prices on the Nexus 7 by then....
Who in their right mind would buy this? (at least until HP cancels it because nobody's buying and cuts the price to $50....)
I'll certainly be considering it. I've been umming and aahing over a Nexus but I'm on a budget and the AU$200 plus price keeps putting me off. Basically all I need is decent battery life, reasonable build quality, and the ability to run a browser. If I can get that for $30 less than a Nexus I'm interested. On the other hand, there's the poorish screen and the HP liability . . .
So buy a PB. The display is very acceptable, build quality is very good (I abused my first one for eighteen months and it still looks pretty good), and it runs a nice browser with Flash. It will get updated later this year to BB10 but, to be honest, I don't think that will be much of an improvement.
Rubbish. The resolution is not everything. I reviewed an Acer A110 and Samsung GTab 2 7.0 on my website and the difference was remarkable. In fact, the Samsung edged the Nexus 7 overall despite a lower resolution
because the overall usability of the tablet.
Until you get the HP in your hands, you won't know if the screen is rubbish, but spec does not dictate everything.
The same goes for the processor. The GTab2 had a dual core 1GHz processor and it largely worked very well. HP has a 1.6 dual core which will not shed a tear running a screen at that resolution and screen size. If this is packaged in a solidly built device then it will sell.
That $30 is more than enough to buy a 32GB microSD (around £10 last time I looked), giving a 40GB tablet compared to a 16GB one. Or shove in a 64GB card for even more storage.
The 7" tablets that do have microSD all seem to be similarly specced to the HP one (as well as being no name brands, so HP may do better on that front), except for ones that involve ordering from China.
Though I would love for a mainstream manufacturer to produce a Nexus 7 level tablet with either microSD, or 64GB storage. (The recently announced Note 8 might qualify, though it's likely to be way more expensive.)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
