Alright well, figured this is probably the better place of any to post this.
So I have had the stream 7 for a couple weeks now, and have been all through its trials and tribulations. Normally I was not hot on the idea of going with a cheap tablet, I wanted a high res screen and a good gpu, but a tablet that ran the full blown version of windows 8.1 intrigued me and at $79 I figured why not try it. The initial reviews were that these windows tablets were pretty capable.
I am only going to touch on the aesthetics, there is nothing really special about the design of the tablet. It weighs just about as much as other non apple tablets, although instead of thin edged and a bulging center HP went with the brick style which I actually kind of prefer. The back comes off to reveal the battery and MicroSD card slot. The battery is actually taped in and the connection for it is hidden behind the first screwed on panel, but it is not hard to remove the first layer and remove the battery pack. So in the future you can expect to be able to do your own battery replacement when you find the battery not holding enough of a charge any more. Unfortunately it is not a situation where you can carry around extra batteries. The battery is super malleable and squishes easily.
Screen wise, the Stream 7 has a very "cool" screen. It is an IPS screen that is very sharp and has some good angles, but compared to alot of the good tablet screens out there, there is a big step down in color vibrance. I am told HP does this in some of their laptops as well, apparently it is an HP thing. I think you can never have to much color vibrance, but it wasn't enough that it was a deal killer. The display was still plenty colorful, and it is very sharp. On the flip side the light spreader as well as screen assemble QA is horrible. The edges of the screen are black (no lights peaking out) but the light spreader is pretty ugly with obvious spot light variances around the sides of the screen. Thankfully it is something you do not notice during normal operation and on digital images, you only notice it on large areas of solid color. Also noting, Xtreme Guard does have a polyurethane skin for it. They have been doing quite well on supporting new devices quickly that are not flagship devices.
Sound, this is one of two large problems with the tablet. Sound quality is fine, however the amp for the tablet is not shielded properly and when active (it turns off until an app opens an audio stream) you can hear the power fluctuations from the processor. It is quiet enough that music will drown it out (I have a pair of ostry earbuds and was hard pressed to identify the sound from the music) but you definitely hear it during quiet moments. Being a shielding issue, I don't think any kind of software can fix this. And it seems to be a problem on a large majority of them as many people on the hp boards have reported the same and of the handful that exchanged their tablet the new one was no better. ALSO it looks like the Stream 8 has the SAME ISSUE. Some people have circumvented this problem by using bluetooth headphones.
Now then, lets look at the cpu and what I have been able to run on this baby. The first thing you need to realize with these tablet is yes, windows is running in 1gb of RAM, and at that about %70 of that is taken up by the OS. However the tablet is pretty speedy working with the swap file on an SDD. The Stream 7 uses an eMMC based hard drive, so faster then SDcards and USB sticks but not as fast as the nice 2.5 inch SSDs. What I look at is this, "can the program or game run in 1-2gb?". If yes then you have a good chance. Anything more and it will likely be a no go. Application wise you shouldn't have issues with anything except maybe photoshop (elements should be fine). And of course premier and after effects is just asking for way to much cpu anyways.
Now for games, I personally did not do this but someone did run Skyrim that was somewhat playable. So this is what I consider the highest end game the stream 7 supports. Some games that I have been running and testing on it were MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) which runs arcades/neo geo games very well on it, Pinball FX2 which also ran descent (supports landscape orientation with some touch support for the flippers), and hearthstone which aside from the intro movie runs great! I have a few more games I want to try like Rift and SF4, but they take up a lot of drive space and I don't have a memory card yet. Also I am still wrestling with the problem of working with games on a windows touch display. For one, most games have trouble doing it at all. I am currently wrestling with MAME and have zero luck because MAME requires a controller to have a controller driver. It requires this so that it can support 4-8 controllers/players. The touchscreen/onscreen keyboard are not a part of a controller driver, and even using a 3rd party on screen controller like gestureworks does not provide MAME with the driver it needs. So at this point I am looking to pick up one of those super portable bluetooth gamepads like the steelworks FREE. (Sadly it looks like all of the software that turns your phone into a bluetooth controller rely on server/client software and do not install as a true controller, so none of them worked either).
So with the software you install out of the way, what about the software that comes with it, the OS. Let us just say that windows 8.1 has made GREAT strides in offering us a good tablet OS, but it is not quite there YET. With windows 8's improved task manager and connected standby mode, the OS handles a lot like the android and iOS tablets we have seen and love. However a few things still creep in that remind us that this is a full blown version of windows on a small laptop. For starters, iOS and Android are very good at popping up the onscreen keyboard any time you are in a text box. Windows RARELY automatically pops open its box (It does it MOST of the time when using the Metro version of IE which IMO is best for tablet mode, anytime you are working in the desktop you almost always need to manually pop the keyboard up). And where Android and iOS are pretty good now about stopping rogue programs from eating battery during sleep, windows is still susceptible to 3rd party drivers and programs that have no idea what connected standby is. Also because connected standby is still "new", bugs pop up. Several people have put the tablet to sleep only to have it turn back on asking if you want to shut down (need to reboot to fix). Also windows being windows, tends to want to do a lot of house keeping the moment you wake the tablet up or put it to sleep. The later resulted in the tablet not responding for a good 10 seconds when I wanted to wake it up just a moment later. On the plus side, because it is windows you have easy access to system and administration tools to figure out anything and everything, which brings me to the final part...
Problems with the tablet. On top of the audio noise issue, the tablet has given people a run around when it comes to wifi connectivity (Only a few people) and power drain during sleep (everyone). Using powercfg /sleepstudy and /energy we are able to determine if any drivers or software is having issues GOING to sleep, and what is using power DURING sleep. Recently we found out that not only is the audio hardware defective, but the driver is junk too. If you have the volume set to anything but 0 (Zero), the driver will not let the cpu sleep. Another problem that only seems to be me ATM is when using /sleepstudy, the UART controller was at %100 which deeply drains my battery in sleep. Searching for UART issues in windows 8 only yields that many months ago on older surface tablets, the UART would drain battery power in sleep unless you turned bluetooth ON. In my case, the only way I can prevent UART from battery draining is if I turn wifi off (and for this I just use airplane mode). Still some heavy discussions on the hp forums but for now, it is probably easiest to shut down the tablet instead of using sleep for long periods of time. The tablet utilizes fast boot (which is literally just logging the user out and then hibernating windows, thus passing by the whole driver load and initialization routine when you start back up) so using shutdown isn't a big penalty.
So my final verdict is it has its problems, but I find for $79 and it's strengths, it is a keeper. It offers a good screen, some pretty good performance, and being able to run anything in windows has serious potential. The audio is a let down, and most if the sleep issues can be circumvented by using shut down. Oh yea, and like all other windows tablets it is a completely open hard drive, so when windows 10 comes out you will be able to upgrade with your own software. Some people have had success with installing the windows 10 preview build on stream 7 tablets (Mainly it is just learning how to do a windows install with secureboot active). Also that does bring me to another note, today's windows tablets encrypt the HD and I didn't find any performance issues because of it. I'm sure some things could perform FASTER with it turned off, but there wasn't an instance where the experience was harmed because of it.
So I have had the stream 7 for a couple weeks now, and have been all through its trials and tribulations. Normally I was not hot on the idea of going with a cheap tablet, I wanted a high res screen and a good gpu, but a tablet that ran the full blown version of windows 8.1 intrigued me and at $79 I figured why not try it. The initial reviews were that these windows tablets were pretty capable.
I am only going to touch on the aesthetics, there is nothing really special about the design of the tablet. It weighs just about as much as other non apple tablets, although instead of thin edged and a bulging center HP went with the brick style which I actually kind of prefer. The back comes off to reveal the battery and MicroSD card slot. The battery is actually taped in and the connection for it is hidden behind the first screwed on panel, but it is not hard to remove the first layer and remove the battery pack. So in the future you can expect to be able to do your own battery replacement when you find the battery not holding enough of a charge any more. Unfortunately it is not a situation where you can carry around extra batteries. The battery is super malleable and squishes easily.
Screen wise, the Stream 7 has a very "cool" screen. It is an IPS screen that is very sharp and has some good angles, but compared to alot of the good tablet screens out there, there is a big step down in color vibrance. I am told HP does this in some of their laptops as well, apparently it is an HP thing. I think you can never have to much color vibrance, but it wasn't enough that it was a deal killer. The display was still plenty colorful, and it is very sharp. On the flip side the light spreader as well as screen assemble QA is horrible. The edges of the screen are black (no lights peaking out) but the light spreader is pretty ugly with obvious spot light variances around the sides of the screen. Thankfully it is something you do not notice during normal operation and on digital images, you only notice it on large areas of solid color. Also noting, Xtreme Guard does have a polyurethane skin for it. They have been doing quite well on supporting new devices quickly that are not flagship devices.
Sound, this is one of two large problems with the tablet. Sound quality is fine, however the amp for the tablet is not shielded properly and when active (it turns off until an app opens an audio stream) you can hear the power fluctuations from the processor. It is quiet enough that music will drown it out (I have a pair of ostry earbuds and was hard pressed to identify the sound from the music) but you definitely hear it during quiet moments. Being a shielding issue, I don't think any kind of software can fix this. And it seems to be a problem on a large majority of them as many people on the hp boards have reported the same and of the handful that exchanged their tablet the new one was no better. ALSO it looks like the Stream 8 has the SAME ISSUE. Some people have circumvented this problem by using bluetooth headphones.
Now then, lets look at the cpu and what I have been able to run on this baby. The first thing you need to realize with these tablet is yes, windows is running in 1gb of RAM, and at that about %70 of that is taken up by the OS. However the tablet is pretty speedy working with the swap file on an SDD. The Stream 7 uses an eMMC based hard drive, so faster then SDcards and USB sticks but not as fast as the nice 2.5 inch SSDs. What I look at is this, "can the program or game run in 1-2gb?". If yes then you have a good chance. Anything more and it will likely be a no go. Application wise you shouldn't have issues with anything except maybe photoshop (elements should be fine). And of course premier and after effects is just asking for way to much cpu anyways.
Now for games, I personally did not do this but someone did run Skyrim that was somewhat playable. So this is what I consider the highest end game the stream 7 supports. Some games that I have been running and testing on it were MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) which runs arcades/neo geo games very well on it, Pinball FX2 which also ran descent (supports landscape orientation with some touch support for the flippers), and hearthstone which aside from the intro movie runs great! I have a few more games I want to try like Rift and SF4, but they take up a lot of drive space and I don't have a memory card yet. Also I am still wrestling with the problem of working with games on a windows touch display. For one, most games have trouble doing it at all. I am currently wrestling with MAME and have zero luck because MAME requires a controller to have a controller driver. It requires this so that it can support 4-8 controllers/players. The touchscreen/onscreen keyboard are not a part of a controller driver, and even using a 3rd party on screen controller like gestureworks does not provide MAME with the driver it needs. So at this point I am looking to pick up one of those super portable bluetooth gamepads like the steelworks FREE. (Sadly it looks like all of the software that turns your phone into a bluetooth controller rely on server/client software and do not install as a true controller, so none of them worked either).
So with the software you install out of the way, what about the software that comes with it, the OS. Let us just say that windows 8.1 has made GREAT strides in offering us a good tablet OS, but it is not quite there YET. With windows 8's improved task manager and connected standby mode, the OS handles a lot like the android and iOS tablets we have seen and love. However a few things still creep in that remind us that this is a full blown version of windows on a small laptop. For starters, iOS and Android are very good at popping up the onscreen keyboard any time you are in a text box. Windows RARELY automatically pops open its box (It does it MOST of the time when using the Metro version of IE which IMO is best for tablet mode, anytime you are working in the desktop you almost always need to manually pop the keyboard up). And where Android and iOS are pretty good now about stopping rogue programs from eating battery during sleep, windows is still susceptible to 3rd party drivers and programs that have no idea what connected standby is. Also because connected standby is still "new", bugs pop up. Several people have put the tablet to sleep only to have it turn back on asking if you want to shut down (need to reboot to fix). Also windows being windows, tends to want to do a lot of house keeping the moment you wake the tablet up or put it to sleep. The later resulted in the tablet not responding for a good 10 seconds when I wanted to wake it up just a moment later. On the plus side, because it is windows you have easy access to system and administration tools to figure out anything and everything, which brings me to the final part...
Problems with the tablet. On top of the audio noise issue, the tablet has given people a run around when it comes to wifi connectivity (Only a few people) and power drain during sleep (everyone). Using powercfg /sleepstudy and /energy we are able to determine if any drivers or software is having issues GOING to sleep, and what is using power DURING sleep. Recently we found out that not only is the audio hardware defective, but the driver is junk too. If you have the volume set to anything but 0 (Zero), the driver will not let the cpu sleep. Another problem that only seems to be me ATM is when using /sleepstudy, the UART controller was at %100 which deeply drains my battery in sleep. Searching for UART issues in windows 8 only yields that many months ago on older surface tablets, the UART would drain battery power in sleep unless you turned bluetooth ON. In my case, the only way I can prevent UART from battery draining is if I turn wifi off (and for this I just use airplane mode). Still some heavy discussions on the hp forums but for now, it is probably easiest to shut down the tablet instead of using sleep for long periods of time. The tablet utilizes fast boot (which is literally just logging the user out and then hibernating windows, thus passing by the whole driver load and initialization routine when you start back up) so using shutdown isn't a big penalty.
So my final verdict is it has its problems, but I find for $79 and it's strengths, it is a keeper. It offers a good screen, some pretty good performance, and being able to run anything in windows has serious potential. The audio is a let down, and most if the sleep issues can be circumvented by using shut down. Oh yea, and like all other windows tablets it is a completely open hard drive, so when windows 10 comes out you will be able to upgrade with your own software. Some people have had success with installing the windows 10 preview build on stream 7 tablets (Mainly it is just learning how to do a windows install with secureboot active). Also that does bring me to another note, today's windows tablets encrypt the HD and I didn't find any performance issues because of it. I'm sure some things could perform FASTER with it turned off, but there wasn't an instance where the experience was harmed because of it.
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