HP Slate 7 Android Tablet Review

The HP Slate 7 is the company’s first tablet offering since the ill-fated HP TouchPad. This is a mid-range device that has hit the market for $180.00 in the US and Canada. The hyping factors about this tablet include the fact it comes with Beats Audio, though it is largely average with most of its specs. How does it stack up against the competition and is it a worthy investment? Hardware The HP Slate 7 features a gunmetal aluminum body on the sides and back of the tablet. The front is done all in black, which certainly doesn’t make it stand out in the crowd. It features a 7 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024×600. It certainly won’t win any awards with the quality of the screen, but average users probably won’t mind. Underneath the hood is a ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz, paired with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. You can enhance the memory further via the Micro SD card, up to 32 GB. There are only a few physical buttons, such as a volume and power button. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top that is used for your Beats Audio. HP is really marketing this device as an official Beats device, but it is relegated to headphones via the internal audio. It does not give you the same type of Beats experience as you would find on the HTC One. This warrants you purchasing $300-$400 headphones to get the most out of your tablet. One of the redeeming factors is the side facing stereo speakers, which give you fairly good sound quality. We tested it side by side with the Kindle Fire HD 7 with Dolby Surround Sound and the iPad Mini, and the Slate 7 fell by the wayside. Software The HP Slate 7 ships with Android 4.1.1 and there is no word if it will receive any further upgrades as time goes on. Google has given HP its blessing, so this device is fully certified and comes bundled with Chrome, Gmail, Google+, and all of your other apps. Currently there are a few hundred thousand apps in the Google Play market place, so you should have no shortage of content. This is about as vanilla as you can get with an Android tablet. The only bloatware that ships on it is an HP E-Print app. Everything else is an official Google app or stock Android. This will appeal to people who love to mess with their device or don’t want to deal with proprietary user-interfaces, such as Samsung. Most of your common apps and games should load fairly quickly with the 1.6 GHZ dual-core processor, but the resolution is punishing. Over the course of this review we put the Nook HD+, Kindle Fire HD 7, and iPad Mini alongside it to see if we can spot any differences. Apps tended to load the slowest on the Slate 7 and the graphics quality also lacked. Reading Experience The HP Slate 7 is priced fairly reasonably, which makes it a Good e-Reader! During our review we loaded in Marvel Comics, PressReader, Zinio, and the Amazon Kindle app. The overall reading experience was fairly lackluster when it came to image heavy content, such as magazines. Colors tended to be more washed out and there was a bunch of negative space on the top and bottom of the screen. Most Android tablets have ceased making physical navigation buttons and decided to go with software driven experience. When you are within most reading applications you still have a blank space where the Back, Home, and Settings buttons would be, even though there is nothing there. There is also blank space at the top of the screen, where it meets the bezel. This may not seem like a big deal, but if you put this side by side with most other 7 inch tablets, it becomes one. The HP Slate 7 is best suited for newspapers, comic books, and normal ebooks. Most comic books are suited for print and their digital editions look perfectly fine. I loaded in a few Marvel Comics and one of the downsides is the lack of effective screen real-estate. It has the same issues with negative space as everything else does. You won’t really get an awesome comic book reading experience unless you have a Retina iPad, where special HD editions are made available. eBooks tend to shine the most on the HP Slate 7! We had a few apps we loaded in our labs and found the overall experience to be average. You can make notes, annotations, and look words up in the dictionary. It certainly won’t give you the same type of e-reading experience as you would find in a dedicated tablet that is geared towards it. Devices such as the Kindle Fire, Nook, and Kobo Arc all have discovery features built right into it, which makes finding new books quick and simple. Wrap Up In the end, this is a woefully average tablet with nothing of note to write home about. Most people might say, Beats Audio, sign me up! Unfortunately, it is relegated to only being available for super expensive headphones, which defeats the purchase of buying a cheap tablet. I would not recommend this device, as it lacks any compelling factors to make it stand out in a crowded marketplace.  Sure, it has a vanilla Android experience, but so does half of them currently available. The only people that might be satisfied with the Slate 7 are first time tablet owners, who don’t know any better. PROS Beats Audio Vanilla Android Experience Gunmetal Body CONS 5 Hour Battery Life Need Very Expensive Beats Headphones Buggy UI Very Average Rating 4/10 HP Slate 7 Android Tablet Review is a post from: E-Reader News

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