HP Introduces Sub-$100 Windows Tablet 182
jfruh writes While Windows-based tablets haven't exactly set the world on fire, Microsoft hasn't given up on them, and its hardware partners haven't either. HP has announced a series of Windows tablets, with the 7-inch low-end model, the Stream 7, priced at $99. The Stream brand is also being used for low-priced laptops intended to compete with Chromebooks (which HP also sells). All are running Intel chips and full Windows, not Windows RT.
now that its not $700 (Score:4, Insightful)
sort of want
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Yeah I would spend $100 to see if I like Windows on a tablet, especially if it is the full version of Windows.
Re: now that its not $700 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Troll much?
Windows 8 is much faster than Windows 7. I love it for its speed of boot-up, and shutdown -- just what I want for a laptop I frequently have to start and stop.
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Troll much?
I love it for its speed of boot-up, and shutdown
That is because it goes into hibernation. They cheat because they can't get it to shutdown or boot from a cold start faster than a Chromebook, even on superior hardware.
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Except that laptops are hibernated, not shut down in most usage scenarios.
But well shilled.
Re: now that its not $700 (Score:5, Informative)
Windows is free to OEMs for devices with smaller than 9" screens.
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Free as in a free boat.
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Re: now that its not $700 (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's probably good enough to do software development on. I can't see it being any slower, CPU-wise, than a Core II duo 5 year old MBP, never mind that it has 2 more cores. It seems like it could be a very good deal - hook up to an external monitor and BT keyboard/mouse and it should be a screamer. It's astonishing how good consumer-grade hardware is these days.
Will it run Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.
Re:Will it run Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.
You might want to be a bit careful, some of the ultra-cheap Windows devices are UEFI only; but 32 bit, which freaks most Linux installers out; but these are not Windows RT machines, so they will not be cryptographically locked out.
Time, and experimentation, will tell how good compatibility actually is; but it should be markedly easier than any Windows RT device, and honestly quite probably easier than doing a Linux port to a lot of common Android devices(yes, bodging a headless debian userland or something onto an Android system is easy; but getting X, using a mainline kernel, or not using bionic, less so...)
Re:Will it run Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.
There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.
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Booting 32 bit UEFI on a 64 bit CPU has been fixed in kernel 3.15. http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux... [kernelnewbies.org]
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As long as you can get drivers you should be able to. It's an x86 rather then ARM based so Microsoft does require the BIOS to support both secure and unsecure booting. If HP hasn't provided a special button press to get into the BIOS during startup (like holding down F1 or DEL, or Volume + like on the Surface) you can get there from Windows now. Boot into Windows 8 and then use Recovery from the start menu to reboot the system into Advanced Recovery mode (sort of a graphical version of the old text menu whe
Re:Will it run Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
Internally, this tablet was codenamed the "Desperation."
So, now HP sells a tablet (Score:5, Insightful)
For less than TI sells a calculator.
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And you can get a very nice RPN calculator app for free.
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Re:So, now HP sells a tablet (Score:4, Funny)
And it still wouldn't be allowed for tests
In my days we used pencil & paper to do math. We had to *gasp* actually work the problem out.
My days sucked.
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My worry has been that kids in grade schools waste a lot of time doing menial arithmetic while they could have been - gasp - actually learning more advanced math instead. Like, you know, shit that one can use later in college. I really wish I didn't need to do all that long division/multiplication etc. - it was really pointless. I used to believe that it was good. I now know better. The whole reason for menial arithmetic was the Victorian-era-called-need for civil servants - back when nobody had a spreadshe
Re:So, now HP sells a tablet (Score:4, Insightful)
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I also grew up in a time where I had to do things by hand with pencil and paper. I remember learning long division, but I don't think I could do it even if I had hours to try to figure it out. We should teach kids about these old methods and the theories behind them but we shouldn't be wasting time teaching them the method and making them memorize how to do it. They will never do long division by hand in their entire life.
Although it's important to teach theory and the methods behind things, what you talkin
How does it handle Pinterest? (Score:3)
If it can handle media-heavy social websites, then I think this would be a winner for my wife and others like her.
Re:How does it handle Pinterest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does it handle Pinterest? (Score:4, Interesting)
They're likely getting a subsidy from MS paid for by future Office365/OneDrive revenues plus I'm sure this has Bing integration so there's some ad revenue to split.
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The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 [intel.com] has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...
I don't think that tray price has much basis in reality. The "$107" N2840 [cpu-world.com] looks, at least on the face, to be not vastly different from the "$86" 1037U [cpu-world.com]. If Biostar can sell a motherboard + 1037U + heatsink + fan for $79.99 [amazon.com], it doesn't take much of a stretch to think maybe these prices are just "list" prices with no basis in reality. Biostar is just selling a bare motherboard so there can't be any Microsoft kickbacks or ad revenue.
That's a reasonable price point... (Score:2)
I guess Microsoft's plan to charge nothing for small screen form factors is having a bit on a effect. Even 20 bucks would be a significant impact on that price. At that price, there'd be enough people to see if you get a Linux distro on it, and it's close enough to cheap android levels.
For me, it's cool, because I'm more versed in Windows development and since it's full Windows, I can easily install whatever the heck I want on it (no developer unlock, etc, etc). Save up, get a few and just have them around
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At that price, there'd be enough people to see if you get a Linux distro on it, and it's close enough to cheap android levels.
What? The last four 7" Android pads I bought were $35 each. $99 is 3x the cost so I am not sure I would call it close to the cheap android levels.
Hell, at $35 I bought one for everyone in the house, plus two floaters to be used in the living room and the kitchen. They are handy to have around. At $99 with windows installed, they can keep them.
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A fair point. I was thinking the Android price point was more around 69-79. Clearly I haven't been shopping extensively.
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Why would anyone on the backwater planet want to connect a pad to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and try to use it like a desktop?
So that you can continue to work on the same project between the tablet-like environment and the desktop-like environment without having to bounce everything off Dropbox and eat into your monthly cap.
New tablet price point (Score:3)
Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.
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Lol, $35 at Fry's electronics down the street from my house. So no need to go to china for them.
Re: New tablet price point (Score:2)
Re: New tablet price point (Score:5, Interesting)
The $35 ones I bought were dual core, 1024mb ram, 2g internal storage, 10 point capacitive touch, with a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32gig card.
So far they play all the games and run just about anything we care to put on them. Though We use them for browsing and as the remote control for the OpenElec XBMC/Raspberry Pi units.
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Yeah but the Windows tablets have a full version of Windows 8.1 and can presumably run most every Windows desktop app. Windows 8.1 itself is $106 at Amazon so HP must be getting a hell of a discount from MS.
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PiPO tablet (Score:3)
There's also a $81 tablet coming from PiPO [neowin.net].
"Pipo" means "beanie" in Finnish, by the way, hehheh.
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And "pipeau" (pronounced as "pipo") means "lie" in french.
Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
A full windows install with Intel chips isn't exactly tuned for mobile battery performance.
So will these things have an exceedingly short battery life?
And I'm betting they will have so little memory as to be unusable -- because Windows with anything less than 4G is a complete dog in my experience.
I predict a terrible product on this one.
Re:Battery life? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got the Asus transformerbook T100. It's a tablet that runs full fat windows 8.1 No fans. Charges USB. I get 8-10 hours of use out of it between charges. (Comes with a detachable keyboard/trackpad which is nice. Also has HDMI out)
It's not as nice as, say, an ipad but it's a full windows machine and it costs half what an ipad does. Since Intel introduced the baytrail Atom they really have been able to make machines that operate in a no-bullshit tablet power enevlope.
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4GB of ram isn't a long shot anymore but Windows 8 runs fine on much less than that. Netbooks have the OS using only 480MB. The cold boot time was 22 seconds which is very reasonable. With version 8.1 it is suppose to be even less memory hungry with a similar boot time.
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If there is a decent navigation app available then they will make a dandy automotive platform, at a hundred bucks. That reminds me, I need to leave a bug report about Viago being a piece of shit.
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And to think that my friend was using a 2009 macbook with 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD until a few months ago. Now it has 4GB of RAM, and while doing development work (Eclipse and another copy of JVM running) and having two accounts logged in, both with Safari open, the swap sits unused, and there's a few pageouts but not too many (a couple thousand per hour)... And this is on Mavericks, which has higher resource needs compared to Snow Leopard.
My kid uses a MBP of similar vintage with 8GB of RAM. It works gre
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I've got an old iMac (about 6 years old) that has the same Core2Duo w/4GB of RAM. RAM is maxed out. I upgraded the HD to an SSD (not for the faint of heart). I dual booted it so that it runs both OSX and Windows 8. W8, with the SSD, runs really nice. Mavericks, on the same machine, is sluggish compared to W8.
On my MBP (same vintage, about a year newer) I have 8GB of RAM with an SSD and Mavericks runs quite nicely. So, from my experience, Mavericks likes to have 8GB of RAM to run well.
You should consider the
Touchpad (Score:2)
I bought a very nice 32GB, 10" HP Touchpad for $150 three years ago. It runs the latest Android and is my daily driver, does everything I want - email, browsing, Netflix, good battery, etc. Bluetooth keyboard if you want it.
Give me micro HDMI ! (Score:2)
I'll buy (may swtich to Linux) if it has a micro HDMI output so I can dock the thing at a real monitor (1960*1200 min). I've been looking around to tablets as desktop replacements and found relatively few x86 with HDMI out.
lol (Score:2)
"HP... wants to offer a range of products to meet different needs..."
Understatement of the century. I think HP has more SKUs than customers.
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yeah four years ago had client who was miffed I didn't know which disk he should order for his HP3000 (that's right runs MPE operating system) off the top of my head.
Then I pulled up 1,200 HP disk SKUs and said, you know they sell just a few different disks.
Good for them! (Score:2)
Last time they had a $99 tablet they sold like mad. [google.com] This should work out well. :D
Don't believe it until you can buy it. (Score:2)
Microsoft has a long history of over-promising, and under-delivering.
This has been going on for decades: "don't buy our competitor's product! We are just about to release something that completely blows it out of the water!" Then Microsoft starts pushing back the delivery date, changing prices, dropping features, and so on.
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Microsoft has a long history of over-promising, and under-delivering.
This has been going on for decades: "don't buy our competitor's product! We are just about to release something that completely blows it out of the water!" Then Microsoft starts pushing back the delivery date, changing prices, dropping features, and so on.
But this is HP...
Marketing: Include a 7! (Score:2)
netbooks are dead, long live Stream(?) (Score:2)
Can I run Steam on Stream? (Score:2)
Or maybe not.
Re:No touchscreen by default (Score:5, Informative)
The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen
I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?
HP is using the Stream brand for both laptops and tablets.
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That's kind of funny, actually. Wonder what genius thought there was a usable market segment for a tablet without a touchscreen?
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The Stream laptops won't have a touchscreen by default, not the tablets.
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No one. Their own quote explicitly said "laptops".
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Nobody did.
There are Stream tablets, and Stream laptops. The GP even quotes the part which says laptops.
A tablet without a touch screen is basically an etch a sketch. :-P
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It concerns me somewhat that it didn't make you stop, think, re-read and understand. Because I surely did and I find it unthinkable that others wouldn't. Scary, even.
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Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?
Mount it on the wall above your desk, plug in a keyboard and mouse, and use it as a cheap PC.
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Of course they are mistaken. The quote said laptops.
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Why is this considered informative? The sentence you quoted clearly said "laptops" not "tablets".
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If you just want to run a single touchscreen app on a cheap tablet, why would you want Windows?
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Perhaps because you already have the windows program that does what you need, and it's a lot easier to update the interface than port it to Android?
Or perhaps because if you dock it with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you suddenly transform it into a low-power desktop system without having to do any inter-device coordination? (My own intended use-case, though I'll admit I currently have no reason to believe these tablets will include an HDMI port, which is kind of essential to the vision.)
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Unfortunately, it's not easy to 'update the interface' of an existing Windows program to make it work on a touchscreen device as a Metro app. That's more or less a total rewrite - and that's where Microsoft went off the rails with Windows 8. They wanted a 'clean' touchscreen OS, so they essentially started from scratch with the application layer. But then they tried to sell it as 'the Windows you know and love'. But you need desktop mode for it to be that. Desktop mode stinks on tablets, tablet mode st
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So what? It's still got desktop mode, and if you're only running the one program you won't actually be using the desktop. Just run your one program full screen and update its desktop-API based interface to be more touch-friendly. Problem solved.
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Maybe it's possible to make an existing win32 desktop app more 'touch-friendly', but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help. And the press glommed on to some "desktop is legacy - metro is the future" line, as though everyone were going to automatically do rewrites. Maybe that's what Microsoft was hoping for, and maybe the press is just dumb. But that's certainly not what is happening. What's really happening is "desktop is legacy - web is the future', and any rewrites that are being done are
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It all depends on your application off course, but I'm going to be dare-devil and claim that the GUI is at most half the program.
So, even though you may need to convert the GUI from 'PC' to 'Tablet'; if things are decently written you can still re-use quite a bit of the underlying code/layers and it all is handled nicely in the same dev. environment you're already used to. I do think it has a lot of things going for it.
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Ever tried to use a touch screen while wearing those blue Nitrile surgical gloves? The ones that make your hands stink?
Not only is the screen not exactly responsive any more, but you have to disinfect it after every use. Not just at the end of a shift, but between every patient you come into contact with.
I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text
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That's because Capacitive touch screens require a capacitive surface to work. You could use a stylus with a special tip for these rare circumstances.
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So now you have yet another thing to carry around and disinfect.
Easier to just put a keyboard and screen in every room. Keyboards are easy to use, and there are keyboard protectors that can be easily disinfected. The screens are larger, so it's a lot easier to see all the necessary data, including what precautions to take, special requirements such as "do not give liquids orally", the patient's schedule if they are seeing specialists for physio or a checkup, etc.
Changing gloves between patients is alrea
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Or just use resistive touch screens instead of capacitive. They can have screen covers just as easily as a keyboard, or even made to be fully waterproof for easier cleaning.
But that belongs with a full-size touch screen rather than a tablet if there's a lot of data to present. Keyboards are no more easy to disinfect.
Re:Screens too small for Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
>Hospitals are a huge source of infections, despite efforts to disinfect everything in sight.
Arguably to some extent because of efforts to disinfect everything in sight. The result being that any infection you pick up has a good chance of being drug resistant. The problem with multiple drug resistant (i.e. virtually untreatable) infections was getting so bad in some hospitals in... the Netherlands I think it was... that they decided to stop disinfecting entirely. Instead they went back to the old fashioned approach of *cleaning* things thoroughly - remove the germs from the environment and it doesn't matter if they're dead or not. Those hospitals are now the safest in the world when it comes to infections. Infection rates are down, and there is no longer any trace of the drug resistant strains so if you do pick up an infection it's easily treatable.
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The hospital cleans everything - floors washed multiple times a day, surfaces wiped down on a regular basis, etc. Infections are going to spread because that's what they do. If the patient is contaminated, they're contaminated. If it's a bug that's transmitted by contact, everything they come into contact with has to be assumed to be contaminated. They have a separate pressure cuff and stethoscope reserved for their exclusive use, etc. But still bugs get transmitted. It happens when you put a large amo
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The evidence in the Netherlands (?) suggests otherwise. When using disinfecting agents the cleaning tends to be much less thorough, because doctors, nurses, custodians, etc. "know" that any germs that don't get washed away will be killed anyway. Which is of course true, for 99.999% of the germs. The problem is the thousands of germs remaining behind, which were immune to the disinfectant and are likely to pass that immunity to their descendants.
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There are phones with resistive screens for people like you. Those work fine with any object that can exert pressure on the screen, gloves or not.
You just have to look out for one.
Full disclosure: I still use an old Nokia with resistive screen myself, one of the reasons being that I like being able to use it outside in winter without having my fingers freeze from taking off gloves and without having to use special gloves with capacitive coating on fingertips. Other being that like most older Nokias, it's a
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I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room.
You also can just not answer your phone right away.
Kind of hard to do when the rest of the family wants to be kept up to date on what's happening to someone who in the space of a month had a quintuple bypass, two strokes that left them paralyzed on one side, cognitive problems, etc., and you want to give the patient feedback from them that everyone's rooting for them, and is there anything they need?
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There is no shortage of jerks with GIANT 5.1 inch smart phones wanting to open office attachments on them what makes you think that a 7 or 8 inch tablet would be any different?
"Hey, the 80s called they want their GIANT PHONE back."
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They might want to run a reader app (similar to Adobe Reader) that would format 100% correctly.
I don't even want to buy Office for a desktop if they're going to keep going with subscription service.
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Why? Works fine on my Surface 2 RT.
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Re:99 is not sub $100 (Score:4, Funny)
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$99.99 is not sub $100, with %8.25 tax, or $5 shipping and handling, or any add on to the cost. :P
It is 1 penny less than $100 so most smart people round up.
I wonder if there are other ways to make the $99.99 into $100 hmmm
Re:99 is not sub $100 (Score:4, Insightful)
In a world where people throw away pennies or leave them lying on the street 99.99 is 100.
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Sub $100.01 doesn't have quite the same ring to it. The point is, it's at or near the threshold and not well above.