HP Slate 7 Plus

HP makes yet another foray into tablets with the release of the HP Slate 7 Plus. Former productions such as the TouchPad and ElitePad were doomed due to slow processors, poor audio hardware, instant obsolescence or some combination thereof. The Omni 10 seemed like a worthy competitor among the large-sized tablet market when released in 2013, but has hardly caught electronics fans’ attention even after a couple of serious price markdowns.

For the Slate 7 Plus, then, HP’s trying a different route, namely the 7” budget tablet way. From the go, however, it’s apparent some of the old design bugaboos have come back to haunt the HP team. Picking up this tablet belies a hefty 0.75-pound weight – notable given the Slate 7 Plus’s proportionately thin look. The black bezel makes the design seem like pretty standard stuff at best, boring at worst, while making the nice aluminum and glass finish look cheap. The 1024 x 600-pixel screen resolution is already well behind even competing budget tablets; truly more effort could have been made here.

In terms of specs, the Slate 7 includes a micro SD card slot for up to 32 GB in extra memory and a micro USB port – but the Bluetooth connectivity is limited to 2.1 only. Two Beats Audio-branded speakers are inlaid in the front of the tablet but are as unimpressive in delivering sound quality as some of HP’s more disappointing previous efforts. Two cameras are included, of 2 MP and 3 MP quality. Performance from the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor is good enough, but who can appreciate this when the hardware is holding everything back?

In the final analysis, we can confidently label the HP Slate 7 another miss for the big company. With its current track record, success for HP in the tablet world feels further away than ever.