The HP Stream 7 tablet seems like a good tablet. Solid build, good performance and nice screen. At $99 it’s a very good deal. Also comes with a year of Office 365 which is worth $65ish on its own. Full Windows 8.1, 1gb of ram, 32gb of storage (though you end up with about 18gb usable) with a micro SD slot. Can’t speak to battery life yet because I haven’t used it long enough. The only bad thing I’ve noticed so far is the speaker is weak and small and on the bottom edge. This is definitely a nice alternative to a Kindle fire and far less expensive than an iPad (with a much better operating system in my opinion).
Update 1:
On the battery life I would say it’s on the low end for a tablet. It’s around 5 1/2 hours of web browsing, email and such. That’s not long compared to many tablets out there but at $99 that’s not bad either. Unless you are a traveler and need longer or you have no life and can spend 8 hours a day on a tablet For the way I use this size of a tablet 5 1/2 hours is fine. And if you were just reading books and not surfing as much that would probably be more like 6 1/2 hours. A Kindle Fire is going to last longer probably closer to 8 hours and an iPad mini is probably 9 to 9 and a half. But each of those costs more, especially the iPad mini which starts at $400 unless you get a previous model which will still be $300ish.
Update 2:
A major issue I’ve found is the headphone jack on this is horrible. It has bad static and a slight buzz. If you are playing music you don’t notice it unless the music gets quiet and between tracks. This only happens when you have headphones plugged in but when you do it’s very noticeable. When you have a low cost device there are going to be compromises but this seems like something you shouldn’t see (or hear) these days. This one is a puzzling issue to me, how HP would put it out like this I don’t really understand. I found a couple of others who reviewed this tablet and mentioned the sound issue to so I don’t think I’ve just got a bad one. Very disappointing considering I really liked everything else about this tablet.
- Camera: QCAM-AA
- Taken: 16 January, 2015