Before I get into the devices, the $149 HP Stream 8 tablet and certain models of the HP Stream 13 laptop (the ones with an optional 4G modem) includes "free 4G for life" for customers in the USA. Reading in the fine print, the device company apparently signed a deal with T-Mobile for 200MB/mo of 4G service. Of course, 200MB will barely cover the Windows Update regimen of certain months, but you have WiFi for that. It is free, and free is good. I can guess that T-Mobile is crossing their fingers that dripping a drop of water on the tongues of the thirsty will convince them to go to the fountain.
If it works? Great. That is just about the most honest way that I have ever seen a telecom company attract new customers.
Back to these devices. Oh right, they're cheap. They are so cheap, they barely have any technical specifications. The $199.99 HP Stream 11 laptop has an 11-inch display. The $229.99 HP Stream 13 laptop has a 13-inch display and can be configured with an optional 4G modem. Both are passively cooled (more fanless PCs…) and run on a dual-core processor. Both provide a year of Office 365 Personal subscriptions. Both are available in blueish-purple or pinkish-purple.
The two tablets (7-inch Stream 7 and 8-inch Stream 8) are a similar story. They run an x86 processor with full Windows 8.1 and a year's subscription to Office 365. Somehow, the tablets are based on Intel quad-core CPUs (rather than the laptop's passively cooled dual-cores) despite being cheaper. Then again, they could be completely different architectures.
While HP is interested in, you know, selling product, I expect that Microsoft's generous licensing terms (see also the Toshiba alternative we reported earlier) is an attempt to push their cloud services. They know that cheaper device categories cannot bare as much royalties as a fully-featured laptop, and not having a presence at those prices is conceding it to Google — and conceding that to Google is really giving up on cloud services for those customers. The simple solution? Don't forfeit those markets, just monetize with your own cloud service. I doubt that it will harm their higher-end devices.
The four devices (Stream 7 – $99, Stream 8 -$149, Stream 11 – $199, Stream 13 – $229) are coming soon.
That laptop gave me AIDS.
That laptop gave me AIDS.
That would be a ClapTop,
That would be a ClapTop, then, and if comes with an APU, or a K1, the graphics would be a whole lot better. Really contra revenue this chipzilla, even your Chinese made, and fabbed x86, is not going to move, if the graphics cannot, at least, match AMD’s, or Nvidia’s, SOC graphics. And those custom ARMv8 present, and future variants, do not need the M$ legacy x86 anchor around their necks. Better dust off some RISC based designs of your own, or license others, your fab process advantage needs a whole load of cash to maintain a lead, and you have yet to best, in low power usage, RISC based SOCs, that are a few process nodes behind. When all process node become virtually equal, the CPU core with the lowest transistor count, is going the win the low power usage crown, in the ultra mobile market, and the Graphics is what will sell tablets, and phones, along with power efficiency. Chipzilla, AMD, and Nvidia will eat your lunch in mobile graphics, if you keep reserving your so called Pro graphics for your most expensive SKUs.
edit: Chipzilla, AMD
to:
edit: Chipzilla, AMD
to: Chipzilla; AMD
needs a semicolon to avoid being confused as part of a list, and not separated from the others. could have used a ‘!’.
It’s only got 2gb of ram and
It’s only got 2gb of ram and barley 15 gb of storage (32gb less the OS) so this really doesn’t need more gpu, especially with the N2840 you arent gonna be able to do anything that would utilize more gpu. It can handle office, it can handle flash, it can handle 1080p video, it’s got a 1080p screen, that’s it. It’s basically a CHromeBook that runs windows instead of chrome. I can see why they would throw this into the wild, see if there is a demand. There was a demand for netbooks back in the day, they just ended up sucking, really really sucking. Time will tell if this is something the consumer wants, and after that we will know if this is something the consumer likes. Personally I would probably buy one IF the storage was doubled. 32gb for a full OS system just doesn’t cut it these days, it wasn’t even enough 15 years ago. 64gb, now that could be interesting.
My wife’s laptop puked so I
My wife’s laptop puked so I stopped by Office Depot. They had a cheap dell 15″ for $299.00 or an HP Chromebook for $279.00. I paced back and forth between the 2 until I finally touched the mouse pad on the Dell. Yikes, Windows 8, there was no way in Hades that I was going to teach this to my wife.
She absolutely loves the Chromebook, logged in with her gmail ID and bam, it was like nothing ever happened to her other laptop.This does everything she needs and it’s quite sexy to boot.
Screw win 8, and Google, load
Screw win 8, and Google, load a full Linux distro on that chromebook, and to hell with the cloud and all the Google/Bing snooping. An HP probook can be had last years model on sale, with a core i3, and maybe in the 375 range, with win 8 pro license, but pre loaded with win 7 pro, and the probooks ship with a SUSE factory installed Linux distro, so if you want you can get a copy and dual boot it with 7, for the 2020 date when 7, goes EOL, and the Linux drivers for the hardware are made by HP, for the probook line, so the support is there. Log in with Gmail, and stay logged in and google slurping all of your metrics all of the time, same goes for win 10 and its bingdows crap. I log into my win 7 computer, not bing, not google, so its just a matter of 2020, and bye windows partition, the FULL tuxbird distro of choice after that.
Yes, I decided to throw down
Yes, I decided to throw down $150 on a Stream 11 on a deal. Its OK but not much more then the netbook of a couple years ago. They call the CPU a Celeron now rather then a Atom. But its still not so great for many tabs open in a browser or doing multi tasking running a HD video. In fact Chrome was such a RAM hog since the OS takes up at least a GB of RAM just running Chrome was a terrible browser for this 2 GB RAM notebook. The SSD is really one of the slowest types and when you get into swap memory the SSD is not so great. Plus, 32GB in a Chromebook is fine, even 16GB will get you by. But in a Windows system its not going to leave you with much room to install programs let alone lots of media files. They do expect you to use the cloud storage. Also the Stream is rather finicky to install Linux, I’ve done it and it runs OK but Wifi is hit and miss and to be honest it runs almost as bad as Windows. This hardware really is lame and I am surprised Microsoft got behind supporting such. Its a poor display of Windows and a so so user experience at best. My advice buy a Chromebook if your cheap or buy a Windows notebook with at least a core i3 and 4GB of RAM.