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HP has announced its own sub-$200 Android slate and named it accordingly. The HP Slate 7 was on the floor at MWC and we gave it the inaugural hands-on treatment, getting a feel for what the company that bought webOS is bringing to Android. The short answer is not much more than what others making 7-inch tablets have already done.
For $170, the Slate 7 is serviceable enough. You get a 7-inch display with a 1024 x 600 resolution, 1.6GHz dual-core CPU, and 3MP camera. The price affords 8GB of storage and 1GB of RAM. Perhaps the biggest differentiating feature is the inclusion of Beats Audio, much like HP has done with its notebook lineup (and similar to HTC’s inclusion of the audio enhancement software).
The tablet has a solid feel for its price point and matches wits with other competitors in the class. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is presented in stock fashion, and you get a few HP-centric apps to round out your experience. Still, we wonder how many more options people need in this class.
At this point, tablet makers are mostly competing on price alone. Specs remain more or less in the same class. Rumors of a new Nexus 7 and other upcoming low-priced devices like the ASUS Fonepad make the HP Slate 7 a hard sell as it is.
Nice try, hp.
They’ll sell a couple thousand due to the tramp stamp it has and it’s color variety.
$169, cheap design, ugly HP “metal” logo, non-customized lazy Android (Google’s NEXUS is pure Android, because Android the world’s #1 OS/open-sources project AND Google’s own OS)
Does HP need it or is it Microsoft-Apple combo wants to “kill” Android tablet market by killing its profitability?
Probably MSFT asked HP to create this to … lol…make Surface more attractive.
The N7 is better for 30 bucks more. ’nuff said.
If it was priced at $120 then maybe it could be considered reasonable but with the Nexus 7 for $199 with updates right from Google and a ton of support there isn’t much reason to buy any other 7″ tablet.
Look @ that bezel…. you can snack off it
Hey Chris / Kevin,
What is up with all your MWC videos? About half of them are still Flash video format and the other half are HTML5 video. It’s great that there’s more non-crap-flash html5 video now, but the inconsistency is maddening, and it turns out that flash is still the “better” choice for two reasons:
1) All the embedded flash vids have the full screen screen icon in the lower-right of the window, making it easy; with html5 you have to right-click > pop-out, and THEN go full screen.
2) only the flash videos can consistently stream 1080p without buffering; html5 often can’t keep up for whatever reason (CDN fail?)
(I know I know… this isn’t all your fault. blame youtube. just wanted to vent.)
The problem with this is that it’s such a typical “me-too” device from HP. If they want to enter the tablet market they need to be a LOT bolder than this. They should be releasing a high-end $400-$500 tablet, too, just for the halo effect alone, even if it doesn’t sell too well. It should be made of metal, very thin and light, 2560×1600 resolution, the latest SoC, and high quality all around. They need to put HP on the tablet map.
Then if they really want to make a mass-market version, they go downwards from that, until they reach the price point, but still making sure it’s very competitive at the price point. That’s the way to go.
if you build they will come ..stay on it HP
windows is dead, no one cares for surface or win8.