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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rootheday3 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Brandon-You say on the Display page of the review:
"It should be noted that these measurements were achieved by disabling Intel's Display Power Saving Technology (DPST) feature, which causes dynamic brightness and contrast depending on the image displayed on the screen. While some other devices do this to some degree, DPST ended up reducing max brightness measurements by nearly 100nits, and the constantly changing brightness played havoc with measurements during analysis and calibration."
and also on the battery life page:
"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."
DPST shouldn't reduce overall brightness - the algorithm it uses is designed to detect dark scenes and change the panel gamma curve to let more light through while reducing the backlight intensity to match. If working properly this can save a lot of backlight power on scenes that have low luminance values and moderate contrast to start with (e.g. movie watching). Normally there should be no noticeable difference in overall brightness of the image (though there may be a second or two of visible modulation if the image suddenly changes from bright to dark or vice versa). If you are seeing drops of 100 or 200 nits brightness when DPST is active, something isn't right.
For what its worth, other devices use techniques (called CABC - content adaptive backlight control) that do the same things as DPST - they generally just don't give you control over it the way that Intel's control panel does.
Are you 100% confident that the visual issues and brightness issues you are describing are isolated to this device or to Intel DPST in general and that other mobile devices don't have similar dimming going on?
Any possibility thaty you are conflating DPST vs Automatic Display Brightness (ADB) based on ambient light sensor detected brightness variations in the room?
Backlight is a huge contributor to platform power in tablets and other very low power mobile devices -If you only disable DPST on Intel platforms but don't disable CABC on other platforms, your low battery life results are perhaps not fair...
Note also that the Intel control panel offers an aggressiveness slider for DPST - can you reduce the aggressiveness value and see if that makes it better visually?
Brandon Chester - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Some other devices do it in the video test, but not in the web browsing test. You can see the brightness of the Stream 7 decrease when you load a very white web page, and it goes back up when you return to somewhere like the Start Screen. This doesn't happen on an iPad. You can see in our Asus UX21 review that DPST does reduce the brightness when showing an all white screen, so I don't think there's anything wrong with my statement that DPST was reducing max brightness in our test.Oh and no, it wasn't ADB, I disabled that right when I set up the tablet.
Laststop311 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Smaller battery than note 4 phone thats only 5.7" is worriesome. This tablet could of been really good if they just upped the ram to 3GB and upped the battery to 4000+mah. I think it would of sold more if they raised the price an extr 25 for the extra 2GB of ram and an extra 15 for the extra 1000mah of battery. Doesn;t a tablet like that for 159 sound a lot better than the current one for 119Laststop311 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Wouldn't mind seeing a 64GB option for 30-50 more as wellados_cz - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
They can't up the ram without changing the CPU which in turn would increase the price further more, the atom Z3735G is limited to maximum of 1GB of ram. But the ram is not problem on this device, I hard-set swap file to 2GB on my Linx 7 (same atom) and it runs just great.Roy2001 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
I have stream 8, Intel Soc performs very well, but OS is not so good.andrewaggb - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I have a 64gb miix 2 8" windows tablet. Picked it up used/cheap. It's pretty decent, but the quantity of windows updates are a bit ridiculous. The app selection is much different, but there's plenty of games and apps my kids like on it. My daughter probably prefers it to the ipad, my son definitely prefers the ipad.Desktop apps suck on it, they run fine, but the screen is too small in my opinion.
Performance wise I think it runs fine.
Battery life is ok, but not as good as an ipad.
I imagine the stream 7 is very similar. For $100 it's probably a great deal. You also get full flash support, which I use for some streaming applications.
spdfreak - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I wonder if these are basically the same as the Winbook Tablets that MicroCenter sells. The MC 7in tablet is 60.00 in today's ad. The 8in with 2GB Ram is 140.00.HD IPS LCD 7" 1280x800 Display
Intel BayTrail-T Z3735G 1.33GHz Quad-Core CPU
1GB RAM & 16 Flash Storage
Windows 8.1 OS
Expandable up to 64GB via microSD Card
The WinBook 7" TW700 Tablet has 16GB of integrated storage, which can be expanded via microSD Card. Includes 1 year subscription for Office 365 Personal.
darkich - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
Good review, and I agree that spec wise this is probably the best tablet for the price.But I would rather recommend buying an used Android tablet for this price.
For 110$ I got an aluminum 8“ IPS (excellent Samsung panel) 800p quad core 3G tablet with 2+5Mpix cameras, even radio, GSM and GPS. Slim, stylish and just 340g of weight. Still 20 months of warranty and in pristine condition.
Finally, for a tablet use case Android is definitely a much better choice than Windows.
jkauff - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
For less than a hundred bucks I can play movies on a handheld device using MPC-HC and madVR on default settings. Pretty cool. BTW, I fixed my headphone jack with a shot of compressed air and a bit of contact cleaner. It wasn't defective, just dirty.