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HP’s new 7-inch Android tablet, the Slate 7, undercuts the brilliantly bargainous Nexus 7 by £30, going on sale next week for the jaw-droppingly low price of £129, direct from HP.
The Slate 7 is HP’s new effort at a touchscreen tablet for normal people, after the utterly disastrous TouchPad. Its strategy now seems to be to make it as cheap as possible to put a touchscreen in your hands, with significantly lower specs than Google’s 7-incher.
With just 8GB of storage and a 1.6GHz dual-core processor, the Slate can’t live with the £159 Nexus’ quad-core chip and 16GB. It’s also running a slightly older version of Android, namely 4.1 Jelly Bean, where the Nexus is up to date on 4.2. It does have expandable storage, however, meaning you can slip in an microSD card for up to an extra 64GB of memory.
None of those things will make any difference if you’re just using it for browsing the Web, checking your email and maybe watching a spot of Netflix. What might dampen your ardour is the 1,024×600-pixel screen — much lower-res than the Nexus 7’s 1,280×800-pixel HD display.
The Slate 7 does boast a 3-megapixel rear camera and Beats audio tech, however, neither of which the Nexus can offer. HP has an ePrint app too, which lets you print wirelessly to a compatible printer. Apart from those tweaks, it’s a very clean version of Android, without any cumbersome skin.
CNET UK’s editor Jason Jenkins went hands-on with the Slate 7 at a preview event at MWC in Barcelona a few months ago. “It’s utterly unexciting and ordinary,” he tells me. “But you know, it’s £129.” Here’s a hands-on video from that show, featuring the boyish charms of Luke Westaway.
What do you think of the Slate 7? Is it just too cheap? Is the Nexus a better deal, even for £30 more? Render your verdict in the blank slate of our comments section, or over on our Facebook page.
