My Thoughts on the HP Stream 7
Christmas was a week and a half, and I am sure everyone has received gifts. Recently the Microsoft store had a deal or a steal depending on what you want, they were selling the HP Stream 7 for 100 dollars. In addition to that, they are including a year of office 365 for the tablet. Now the interesting thing about this tablet is that its a 7 inch tablet and I believe the original price was around 200 or even 250. I am still checking on that but everyone has it listed at 100 dollars.
Anyways, this is a very interesting tablet. Anyways here are the guts.
Display:7 in HD IPS touchscreen (800 x 1280), 5-finger multi-touch support
Processor: Intel Atom Z3735G quad core 1.33 GHz with Burst Technology up to 1.83 GHz
Memory:1GB DDR3L-RS 1333 MHz
Well the important specs that matter…cause I don’t see the point of having a back facing camera on a tablet but thats another thing for another day. Anyways, from looking at the guts of this tablet, it has some pretty decent tech behind such a cheap tablet. Personally this is a great tablet, especially with the price and coming with office and onedrive.
BUT! There are a few snags that could hinder your liking of this tablet. DO NOT THINK THIS WILL REPLACE YOUR LAPTOP OR DESKTOP. Only one tablet can actually do that and thats the surface pro 3. This tablet is meant to be a tablet, something that attaches to your full computer experience, think of it like the ipad mini to your macbook pro. Another crazy downsize to this tablet, is what you see is what you get, the text for the apps can’t be increased, the font will stay…well that size, windows 8.1 is very rocky on a tablet especially if you want to use the desktop mode or somehow use this thing as a “desktop” Also even though it is rocking a gig of DDR3 ram, I still found it chugging when I had several apps open.
So far I have been using this as a note taking device or just a small gaming tablet, or my favorite, something to read on the go with. It isn’t a tablet that will replace my surface but it does make reading a lot easier cause a surface pro 1 can get heavy and I have dropped it on my face. Plus sometimes I don’t want to take my surface pro places. This HP stream helps take off the load off of my surface by migrating a few of the things I enjoy doing on a smaller tablet. Also something I do like bout this tablet especially is the fact that it feels sturdy but is still lightweight.
Overall, if you are looking for a small tablet just meant for carrying around and using in a casual process, the HP Stream 7 is yours, it runs apps really well, allows you to answer emails and work on smaller subtasks away from a computer but its not a replacement for your computer just keep that in mind.