HP Stream 7 Review: A $119 Windows Tablet
by Brandon Chester on December 19, 2014 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
The battery life is one of the areas that I was concerned about when I purchased the Stream 7. It sports an 11.1Wh battery, which is smaller than the battery in some smartphones like the Galaxy Note 4 and the Nexus 6. However, the battery life of a device does not depend entirely on the battery capacity. The power draw of the display, CPU, RAM, and other components will be what determines how fast the battery is drained. To evaluate the battery life of the HP Stream 7, I've run it through our web battery life test and our video playback battery test. I've also run our video test on the iPad Air 2 as it was unable to be tested in time for its original review. This provides a point of comparison to another modern tablet, albeit a much more expensive one.
Unfortunately, there's just no getting around the fact that the Stream 7 has a really small battery for a 7" tablet. It gets the lowest score in both our web browsing and video playback tests. Both results are significantly less than the "up to 8 hours" that HP rates the battery for. It's likely that enabling Intel's DPST will improve these results, but all that really means is that dimming the display below our 200nits standard will improve battery life.
Charge Time
With a smaller battery, one can at least hope that the time to charge it will be shorter than other devices. However, this will be influenced by the charger that the company supplies with the device. In this case, HP has included a 10W charging block with the Stream 7. What's funny is that it's not an HP branded charger; it's a Chicony Electronics charger with an HP sticker on the front.
Thankfully, the Stream 7 doesn't take very long to charge after its short battery life has been used up. It's not quite as fast as the Galaxy Note 4 or Nexus 6, both of which ship with higher wattage chargers, but it's still much quicker than the other tablets on our list as a result of its smaller battery. One thing to note about charging the Stream 7 is that I was unable to get it to charge off of any computer USB ports. This was surprising, because my computer has 1.5A USB 2 ports that are able to charge even the iPad 3 and its massive battery.
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SanX - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Any tablet or phone with less then 1920x1080 must go straight to the drain or dollar storeBMNify - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review, inexpensive but decent windows 8.1 tablets are generally ignored by PR driven tech media. Will like to see the reviews of other Baytrail tablets like Dell Venue 8 pro, Acer iconia W4, Asus Vivotab Note 8 and Lenovo Mixx 2 8.sonicmerlin - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
The biggest problem with Windows is that the Metro UI is boring and even ugly. It's claustrophobic and gets old real quickly.PC Perv - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Pathetic tablet and pathetic review to "excuse" its shortcomings. Amazon Kindles are way better deals.garbagedisposal - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Said no one ever. Time to climb back into the dumpster you little troll.PC Perv - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Rofl. HP Stream 7 is just the right tablet for your, for just $119. Enjoy.I'd rather donate that money to UNICEF.
digiguy - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
For those looking for a 8 inch Windows tablet with 4GB of RAM, it exists. And it also has 128 GB of (emmc) storage, the most powerful atom CPU (z3795, not very far from some i3 but fanless), micro HDMI, USB 3.0, full HD and LTE. It is the updated version of Thinkpad 8. Here in Europe it costs a little less than the Surface pro 3 with i3.... I would have bought one if weren't for lack of a stylus (essential for me in such a small, but premium, tablet...)Spectrophobic - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I got my Stream 7 for $64.10 from the MS Store; bought it due to being morbidly curious about how Windows run with only 1GB memory. Turns out, not bad. Well, while it's still predominately memory-bottlenecked, things can go smoothly when used the right way. In terms of web browsing, you pretty much have to stick to desktop/Metro IE. Chrome is fine when you only work with a single tab. YouTube videos are only good up to 720p on most videos and the same applies to x264 videos.The only real gripe with the thing is audio; the speaker sucks and the 3.5mm jack has static. I refuse to hear any audio coming out of this thing, unless if you put a USB DAC/amp with it. My unit unfortunately contains dead pixels. Minor, but my OCD refuse to forget about it. Kinda considering returning it...
In the end of the day, it's a good tablet for the money that is actually back by a known company. It's good, not very good, just barely good. But, I still consider it as a "toy" due to its limitations. Hopefully, a company would come up with a Windows 10 (with Bing?) with a decent SoC with 3GB RAM, 10" 1920x1200, and a stylus (that can fit into the thing) for $300.
sonicmerlin - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Except the Zoom in function to increase font size doesn't even work in IE (or Chrome). It just zooms in the entire page, making it impossible to zoom out. It's extremely annoying having to read small font on a low res screen.Spectrophobic - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Uhhh, I don't have any problems with zooming in or out in Chrome, Desktop IE, or Metro IE. By "Zoom in function to increase font size" do you mean: 1) Pinch zooming, 2) Web browser scaling, or 3) Windows scaling?Also I'm on 125% windows scaling.