Alright guys! Sorry if I haven’t been posting lately since I was busy with many little things . What caught my eye today is that I would like to introduce to you… The HP Stream 7. This little tablet PC is not just a tablet PC you could buy anywhere. This is the cheapest tablet PC that a poor university student could afford or eventually a good one for your kids to play and browse with (in safety of course) too. So, I bought one just to try it out and benchmark it but this is eventually powerful than our old netbooks that we have in the past.
Quality and Performance
Now, quality is all we have been after. We all know that HP computers in terms of the line of laptops always has a very bad history on the overheating parts due to the poor engineered ventilation they have. Although that’s going to change pretty soon. This tablet’s material is all plastic but a good quality kind. Of course, if you drop it… the glass breaks as well as the plastic (but only a couple of drops or a hard impact of the drop). The screen is pretty nice and decent. Shows the full image regardless of what orientation you are in. It’s almost like the smartphone screens you’ve been holding on to all the time. For the camera, it’s not at its best result but it helps a lot. Not for the selfies of course. It doesn’t generate much heat upon use especially playing old games that you love so much. One video I saw on YouTube projects a man playing Half Life 2 on this tablet and runs pretty nice. Which means, the result of this tablet is powerful enough. But that doesn’t mean you can play any game here since it’s not a gaming machine to begin with. USB port is basically a microUSB port found mostly on smartphones. So, chances are that one false move… that’s where it breaks. The battery lasts as expected since this is the kind of tablet PC that would go for a good day of learning and writing in the university (6 hours I presume) but of charging time also has its cons too.
Portability
The nice thing about owning this tablet is that you can use it as a laptop too. Or should I say, a netbook. The good thing about this tablet that it has bluetooth with it. Which means, I can eventually hook up a bluetooth keyboard with a touchpad and place the laptop on a custom case so it would look much like a pretty nice little 7 inch netbook. with a touch screen (which defeats the purpose of owning a Microsoft Surface as a student). This is pretty much student-friendly in my own view since not every student wants to bring a big laptop (except for those who owns the size and weight of a MacBook Air 11″, 10″ netbooks that are lightweight, and chromebooks). What’s nice that you can put this on the palm of your hand too and write (or type on the screen) for taking notes in classes or in meetings. Even a Pastor of a Pentecostal church would dig to this instead of an iPad… If he’s cheap enough (pun intended).
Accessories
What comes with and what’s available on the market… Is what will go with it. The OTG USB cables (which allows you to connect external devices) are not available as official accessories although 3rd party ones will work. But majority is that USB hard drives will be weak in power since the data transfer is not that nice at all. Pen drives would still work since it uses less power. You can not just use a charger that you use on the smartphone since this tablet is pretty much different in the ampere. So, using the same charger you use for your mobile phone or old tablets (if you had any) is not really much recommended especially the Apple chargers you use for your iPhone and iPad. The covers are available on the market but not every shop in where you will be buying this won’t have it. Bluetooth devices such as keyboards, mouse, headsets, and cameras (maybe) can be connected to this device.
Connectivity
WiFi connectivity is pretty wide but doesn’t take much bandwidth due to the battery’s stability and how it is built. Bluetooth supports a range of common Bluetooth accessories (as mentioned earlier) as well. PC Connectivity is also assured (that is if you want to transfer files from your computer to this tablet PC. The tablet will act like how common tablets are sold in the market. But the charging will still come from the standard chargers in the end.
Storage
A second storage capability is available in a form of a MicroSD card. You can easily install a 32GB microSD card to store files and photos (probably) so that you won’t use up much of the space in this HP Stream 7 tablet. of course, the memory card is detectable on another computer when you connect the tablet as an external device to transfer files. File transfer via USB pen drives is possible with a USB OTG cable too. But external portable hard drives is not supported that much due to the power of this tablet is actually that low.
Conclusion
In the end, I like the tablet since it helps me with Univeristy stuff as well as take notes since I don’t want to bring much paper. The best thing about this tablet, is that you can make it like a makeshift laptop too with just a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Plus, a memory card placement for additional space makes it even better to buy this tablet. The bad thing about it is that it doesn’t have at least a USB port for you to connect an external pen drive. Plus, it comes with the Office 365 subscription which works both on your PC (laptop or dekstop) as well.
And I highly recommend this if you want a cheap tablet PC running Windows 8.1 for yourself or for your kids or for your school work.
