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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lioncat55 - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I own the stream 7, the 1GB of ram can be pushed very far. Its shocking to me what I can do. Heroes of the Storms plays easy at the lowest settings.mrdude - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Petition to rename the bottom of all GPU related benchmarks as 'The Intel Zone'smilingcrow - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Using 4 decimal places for Maximum Brightness which is a value in the 100s is plain silly. Rounding to the nearest integer seems sensible to me.Hairs_ - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
"The other thing that motivated me was the general lack of coverage for devices at the low end of the market. News coverage and reviews always seem to focus on the newest iPad, the newest Galaxy Tab, or the newest Ultrabook. There's not as much attention paid to these inexpensive devices, and it's problematic because many people simply cannot afford more premium devices that cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars. If nobody takes a look at the low end, there's also no push for manufacturers to improve those devices."THANK YOU!
Finally someone gets it. Even if this product isn't fantastically amazing, or doesn't have some esoteric use case which requires research, or a sexy pr angle, there are lots of prospective buyers at this level who are being left absolutely in the lurch by tech sites.
More of these, please!
MonkeyPaw - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
The ironic thing about the Windows Appstore is that, despite having terrible selection and quality in general, it has the best RSS (Freely) client I have ever used on a touch device in NextGen Reader.Arbie - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I agree with Hairs. These are interesting devices and some crucial facts like actual battery life are nowhere available. Others comment that 2GB etc are better; well, maybe test some of those devices too. I personally have no interest in flagship smartphones.BrokenCrayons - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review. I've been really curious about the Stream 7 for a while now and I'm glad it got the usual, thoughtful treatment from Anandtech. Windows tablets, inexpensive ones in particular, don't get a lot of attention which makes being an informed buyer pretty difficult.bill.rookard - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
The point of this article is that there are no bad devices, there are bad price points. I have one of these, and I picked it up at the local retail store. I didn't pay 119.00 for it, I didn't pay 99.00 for it. I got this for $79.00 out the door. They had a $20.00 off special for it, no coupons required.While certainly it is not a perfect device by any means, in truth, at $80.00 it's one of those price points where you just can't go wrong. It runs full Win8. Decent display. Sufficiently powerful for a tablet. Battery life is long enough for what I use it for, and it's removable and replaceable. I haven't tried the audio jack yet (I may do that when I get home now that I'm aware of it), but still, again for what I paid for it, how could I complain?
Michael Bay - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Brandon, you really should have reviewed a Stream 8. Nobody expects anything from 7, but at 150$ there should be less compromise in specs and build of the device, making it much more desirable.And why all this Mami fixation, really.
Spectrophobic - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I don't think a mere inch is worth almost double the price of a Stream 7 on sale. A bigger battery is always good but in terms of running the thing at 100% scaling, a fine point stylus is still required. It's nice for $150 if it has 2GB RAM.Also, it's Mami-san. Who couldn't resist her?