HP Slate 8 Pro

The HP Slate 8 Pro might garner some quick comparisons with other 8-inch tablets, like Apple's iPad Mini -- thanks to its 4:3 aspect ratio -- or Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 -- due to its sleek all-white body -- but the superficial resemblances end there. The HP tablet one-ups its fellow 8-inchers, with its sharp 1,600x1,200-pixel resolution IPS display, Nvidia's speedy Tegra 4 CPU, and a healthy 2GB of RAM.

Despite the plastic build, the Slate 8 Pro is really nice to hold, and it’s hard to deny that it has a certain charm. The plastic backing also helps to keep the weight down on all of the Android tablets.

The HP Slate 8 Pro ships with a powerful Nvidia Tegra 4 Krait 300-architecture quad-core SoC clocked at 4 x 1.8 GHz, including an Nvidia GeForce Tegra 4 graphics chip for 2D and 3D graphic calculations. This SoC is augmented by 1 GB of DDR3 SDRAM and 16 GB of system storage (with 12.3 GB remaining after Android 4.2.2 and the preinstalled apps are subtracted). If the latter should prove to be insufficient, a micro SD card can always be installed (with up to 32 GB).

On past HP tablets, the display has been one of the biggest letdowns because of poor color reproduction. On the Slate8 Pro, the story is a little bit different.The display itself is actually pretty good. The 1600x1200 resolution clocks in at roughly 250PPI, which isn't too shabby and makes for a decent reading experience. In fact, because of the increased display size, I've been reaching for the S8P over the 2013 Nexus 7 the majority of the time if I plan on reading. Or watching videos. Or surfing the web.

In term of performance, HP Slate 8 Pro really screams (and annoyingly loud.. haha :D). With the monster goodies like a quad-core 1.8GHz Tegra 4 chipset, 1GB of RAM and 72-core GeForce GPU, you can do a lot of things on this device. Too bad this tablet only comes with 1GB of RAM, which is considered as small for today’s standard.