HP announced it’s recommitting itself to the tablet game following the troubled HP Touchpad saga—its new Slate 7 tablet is a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 that will go on sale for $169 in April of this year. HP hopes printing will be one of the tablet’s key differentiating factors, and the tablet should be able to print from most apps both by using native drivers and through HP’s ePrint technology.
The tablet’s stainless steel construction looks solid, though for this price you shouldn’t expect top-of-the-line specs: its display is only 1024×600, and it supports only 2.4GHz 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1. Included in the tablet are 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, a front-facing VGA webcam, and a rear-facing 3.0 megapixel camera. It’s all packed into a 13.05 ounce, 10.7mm thick package that HP estimates will last for five hours of video playback. HP wouldn’t say exactly what SoC is powering the Slate 7, but a 1.6GHz dual-core Cortex-A9-based chip only leaves us with a few real possibilities—it’s likely to be some variant of the Texas Instruments OMAP 4 that also powers the Kindle Fire lineup.
The tablet looks reasonably attractive for the price, but it should be noted that the Nexus 7 still beats it in a few important metrics (albeit at a cost of $30 more). The Nexus 7 features a quad-core Tegra 3 SoC (though at a slightly lower clock speed), a higher-resolution display, more internal storage, and stock Android 4.2. While the Slate 7 offers a microSD card slot and a rear-facing camera, the rest of its specs compare more favorably to the $159 Kindle Fire than to Asus’ and Google’s tablet.
You may also notice this tablet isn’t quite the same as the one outed by ReadWrite earlier this month—if that hypothetical Tegra 4-equipped tablet exists, it will likely be larger, more powerful, and more expensive. While HP couldn’t tell me anything more about future tablets when I spoke with them, they did note they were planning several more product launches on both the Android and Windows sides of the fence throughout 2013.
The smartphone market is something else again—while both CEO Meg Whitman and the HP representatives we spoke to reaffirmed that HP was looking to re-enter the smartphone market, we were told it wouldn’t be happening this year. Expect more news about HP smartphones, but don’t expect to see any of them before 2014.
HP has told us the tablet will be at Mobile World Congress this week. We'll report back with hands-on impressions if we can get near it.
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