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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ClockworkPirate - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
The Stream 8 also has an LTE radio. For that reason alone I'm considering returning the 7 I got for my brother... Free 200MB/mo from T-Mobile is just so tempting.Spectrophobic - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Oh yeah, forgot about that. That could be a good point for several people. But for myself, who only uses a tablet at school or at home, it isn't a big deal.damianrobertjones - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
"microSDHC (Up to 32GB)"It's odd that they state that... It WILL work with the 64GB cards and, probably, 128GB.
Brandon Chester - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Yeah I would expect it would go higher, but I don't have a 64GB card to test and I don't want to ruin someone's day by having them buy this and a MicroSD that ends up not working.cruzinforit - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Brandon- is that a copy of Kisses, sighs and cherryblossom pink I spy sitting next to your Mami figurine?Brandon Chester - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
No.azazel1024 - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
For the eMMC performance, I don't know why you'd be super surprised. I've run a couple of different benchmarks on my Asus T100 with a Sandisk SEM64 in it (64GB eMMC) and I get around 20MB/sec read and write 4k numbers. About 40MB/sec sequential write and 105MB/sec sequential read. This is both when I got it new and I ran the test a few weeks ago to see how TRIM had been keeping up over the last year that I've owned it. I got roughly the same numbers I did before (using ATTO and Crystal disk both). I'd imagine that'll fall apart quickly, but it is pretty good with random/small file performance in both testing and real usage. Its just that the sequential numbers are kind of sucky on the eMMC in the Asus T100.Of course that says nothing about the HP Slate 7, I am just saying I don't think the numbers are necessarily suspicious.
On a different note, anyone here when Airmont/Cherry Trail might finally be dropping?
azazel1024 - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Also, Brandon, on the storage utilization, you mention that there is missing space you have a hard time tracking down. What is shown under the settings for usage doesn't take in to account things like the hiberfile.sys (hibernation file, which is generally equal to the installed RAM base), page file or any recovery/restore partitions.Brandon Chester - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I tried to take that into account based on what the tablet originally had free before I did anything with it. There's just stuff that accumulates like files left in Program Files after you uninstall a desktop app, and files stored in Appdata that don't get deleted.Death666Angel - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I take my windows file system over any android or iOS stuff any day of the week. I know more about the things on my 7 drives in my windows desktop than I do about what is on my 16GB smartphone/tablet.