HP Stream 7 – How low can Windows 8.1 go?

7" HP Stream 7 top 8" Asus VivoTab Note 8 bottom

I ordered one of these this Wednesday evening and got it yesterday and have been using extensively since. First thing of note. HP stated incorrectly on the ordering page (which has taken down Thursday and is still offline) that this device has a micro SD slot, it DOES NOT. That’s an instant deal breaker for many. With a $10 off coupon code including taxes and free shipping the thing only cost me $96.51. I was mostly interested to see how well these new Z3735G Atoms that only support 1 GB of RAM worked running 8.1. And it comes with a year of Office 365 personal which in addition to the tablet can be installed on one other machine, PC, Mac, iPad of Android tablet. That costs $69 for a year, so the tablet is just another $30. With the new unlimited storage I figured I’d try out 365 anyway.

So the big questions are how well does a Windows 8.1 device work with only 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. I think very well considering that this was a $100 device, by far the cheapest new Windows machine I’ve ever purchased. This $100 runs circles around the $500 Clover Trail Samsung Ativ 500 I bought 2 years ago at Windows 8 launch with twice the RAM and storage. It performs very much like the Asus VivoTab Note 8 picture above. There’s a lot of memory swapping going with more than a few things open and there will be a second or to lag when switching between lots of apps. But it’s still perfectly usable and it should fine its target purposes, web browsing, email, eReading, casual gaming, etc. You’re not going to run big desktop apps on it anyway as the 7” screen is really pushing it for touch usability with the desktop, though there are exceptions like Office.

The other resource issue is the 32 GB of storage. Windows 8.1 Update introduced a new install option, WIMBoot, which is a compressed Windows image. With that in place the device came out of the box with only 4GB used for Windows. With that and the 5 GB recovery partition there was about 20 GB of free space. After all of the updates, Office 365 install and most of favorite modern apps, I’ve got 10 GB left. The 5 GB recovery partition can be removed and put on an SD card for Flash drive. The micro USB connector supports USB devices with an OTG cable. So if you need local storage space this device won’t do it. But there are other Z3735G devices that do have micro SD slots.

Lastly, the build quality is decent for a cheap device, the plastic for the back is a finger print magnet. It feels kind of heavy, it weighs 12.3 ounces and it’s certainly not the thinnest thing either. But it feels solid and sturdy. Fine for the price. And the screen is good, bright IPS, good viewing angles. It warms up a bit during charging and when running hard, but nothing anywhere near hot. The cameras the cheap garden variety found on Android devices in the price range. There zero bloatware on the device, the only thing installed is the HP Assistant device management utility and that’s it. Pretty much all of these devices are like this and it’s the way every Windows device should be.

While there’s nothing new here it’s hard to argue against what you get for $100. What would really push this device over the top is HDMI out and an SD slot. But the margin on this thing is razor thin even with the free Windows license. I suspect that these cheap Windows devices with year of Office 365 will do well this holiday season. If one needs Office, likes the new unlimited storage of OneDrive or just needs a basic cheap tablet for web browsing, email, etc. and don’t need or care about tons of apps, this works.

Thanks for the review. I bought the Toshiba Encore Mini about two weeks ago and it has much of the same specs as the HP Stream 7. The biggest difference is the Toshiba has a shittier display, only 16GB of internal, and a microSDXC slot. I can still return it and I'm thinking about returning it because from what I've seen, the HP looks like its better quality.

Aaron11 said:

Thanks for the review.

Click to expand...

Thank you! My Stream 7's screen has a little bit of backlight bleed that's notable when booting up. I've watch some video on it last night in the dark in bed but didn't find it an issue. More obsessive type would probably take issue but for the price point it's difficult to argue over every little thing. The screen is certainly not bad and suffers from none of the issues that I've heard about that Toshiba. The Streams 7's screen is native 1280x800 IPS.

Also the battery life in mixed use seems to be getting me only about 6.5 hours at about 1/3 screen brightness. PC makers are well known for pumping up battery numbers. Sometimes is takes a few discharges and recharges to get the optimal battery life but 8 is probably on the upper end with somewhere between 6 to 7 hours being more realistic.

Great review! I'm still waiting from amazon on mine, the manuals and the site says that there's a micro sd slot, I think its has a removable back cover so you can slot it there. and what are you doing on the device for the battery tests.Have you installed chrome browser, and are you doing any desktop stuff. and please post a picture quality from the front cam. Thanks!

My primary use for mine would be browsing on chrome about 7 tabs open (hope the 1gb will be enough), light indie gaming and skype.

solrax said:

Great review! I'm still waiting from amazon on mine, the manuals and the site says that there's a micro sd slot, I think its has a removable back cover so you can slot it there.

Click to expand...

I'm an idiot! You're absolutely correct about the back cover coming off! I just noticed a notch in the corner where you pry it off and there it is, an SD slot. I just tried a 32 GB one and it works fine, need to try something larger to see if that will work.

solrax said:

and what are you doing on the device for the battery tests.Have you installed chrome browser, and are you doing any desktop stuff. and please post a picture quality from the front cam. Thanks!

Click to expand...

I've not done any formal battery testing, just using the device for web browsing, casual gaming, streaming video and a little Office work, how I'd use it normally day to do. I'll post some pictures from the camera this evening. I can tell you know that it's a pretty crappy camera indoors. Outdoors it's ok.

solrax said:

My primary use for mine would be browsing on chrome about 7 tabs open (hope the 1gb will be enough), light indie gaming and skype.

Click to expand...

I've not tried Chrome yet. IE tends to run a lot better on these Bay Trail devices. IE seems to be much better optimized for these low resource devices and certainly is better with touch. I'll give it a try later though just to see.

Well was over at the mall today doing some shopping. Microsoft had a spend $75 get $25 off of your purchase, so that made the Stream 7 only $75.

So at that price I picked up two. One for the wife and one for the mother in law.

Hope they enjoy! It will be interesting to see how well these cheap Windows tablets and hybrids do this holiday season. Two years ago when 8 was launched $500 was the base price on even the lowest end Windows tablets, now they've going for less than $100 on a routine basis. And these newer Atoms are much faster than those.

If you count Windows tablets, hybrids and touch laptops, I wouldn't be surprised if outsold the iPad this season.

heatlesssun said:

Hope they enjoy! It will be interesting to see how well these cheap Windows tablets and hybrids do this holiday season. Two years ago when 8 was launched $500 was the base price on even the lowest end Windows tablets, now they've going for less than $100 on a routine basis. And these newer Atoms are much faster than those.

If you count Windows tablets, hybrids and touch laptops, I wouldn't be surprised if outsold the iPad this season.

Click to expand...

Microsoft store had huge displays of stack and stacks of the HP Stream 7. I think they are going to sell a lot of these.

Wife sort wanted a Windows Tablet since I got my Dell Venue 8 Pro.

I have a Toshiba Encore and enjoy it very much so. I have been looking at the stream as a kind of secondary for a different part of the house. It actually surprised me how well windows runs on these with small amounts of ram.

Spun Ducky said:

It actually surprised me how well windows runs on these with small amounts of ram.

Click to expand...

There's a lot misconceptions about these low resource Windows devices. Many are simply looking at the specs and immediately think they're slow garbage when the opposite is true. When I first heard of Windows 8.1 Update supports these low end devices I was skeptical myself. It looks like Microsoft and Intel worked to avoid a repeat of the original netbook era of poor performance.

Curious how well this handles gaming? This question will be relative of course. But let's say compared to the Silvermont devices which typically have 2GB of ram. And also of course the different GPU. Aside from performance this is the only implementation of PowerVR for Win x86 (and I guess a DX as well) environment, from what I understand Intel actually had to due in house driver work to do this.

I'm more interested in the HP Stream 8 due to the larger screen and 200MB of lifetime data, since I have no smartphone data, but that's not available here in Canada.

Also I'm wondering what the actual cost tradeoff would've been for 2GB of ram. I'm wondering how much of the 1GB of ram decision is due to forced artificial product tiering. Same with HDMI/DP out.

There are a number of YouTube videos demoing games on these low end 1 GB Atom devices. Clearly they aren't designed for desktop PC gaming however it's not totally out of the question depending on the game and settings. Tablet app gaming though is fine.

I've been very pleased with the Stream 7 thus far, it's great for tablet gaming and web browsing and the use of certain desktop apps like OneNote.

Happy thanksgiving guys, I wonder if IE on the Stream 7 "retains" the web page when you have multiple tabs (say... 4 or 5 tabs) open simultaneously or it has to reload the tab after you came back from other tabs?

i just picked up a 7 inch winbook from microcenter for 59 bucks.

I actually made a mistake earlier assuming this was using Merrifield but it's Silvermont.

The main difference with the 3740D (used in the Asus Vivotab Note 8) is the memory support is limited to 1 channel and 1GB, and so less graphics performance.

Now I'm not sure if I want the Stream 7 for $95 (and likely ~$15 for a 32GB SD) or the Vivotab Note 8 64GB for $235.

The Vivotab is a lot more capable for me (pen support, 2GB, storage) but a lot more costly and slightly less portable.

How do you find the two actually? Are you using one more than the other now? How do the screens compare (other than size)? Performance?

I'm curious if you've tried running photoshop?

Went from wanting to get a SP3 or Thinkpad Yoga all the way down to the Stream 7 just due to being frugal (or cheap ).

In the long run I'm still interested in a Surface Pro (or similiar) and hopefully they keep iterating it. Maybe a Skylake update at this point a year+ form now. My biggest issue with the current Surface Pro 3 is you're basically paying the large premium for a higher end Core i5 CPU which is already not only near end of life (and ready to be eclipsed) but you also can't actually fully use the performance due to thermal limitations. But this is really another rant.

David-Duc said:

Happy thanksgiving guys, I wonder if IE on the Stream 7 "retains" the web page when you have multiple tabs (say... 4 or 5 tabs) open simultaneously or it has to reload the tab after you came back from other tabs?

Click to expand...

Never considered this and would be interested in the answer as well since I don't have a data plan and this issue annoys me on my smartphone currently.

The HP Stream 7 does well enough to be able to run Rift well enough to get dailies and do minions.

I just bought my wife the Stream 8. It's the same as the 7 except it has 200mb of 4G data a month from T-mobile. $179 before tax. These are seriously the coolest little things I've ever seen.

Question, is there a way to get HDMI to work out of the USB port?

You might want to check this out: http://plugable.com/2014/11/20/plug...-8-pro-nextbook-8-win-8-1-the-lenovo-miix-2-8

Says the HP Stream 7 is compatible, I would think the 8 would be as well but someone on there would probably know if not now then soon.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm sure it's compatible.

Any idea how the Toshiba Encore 2 stacks up against the Stream? It looks like it has 2GB of ram and a 64 GB ssd for only a few dollars more than the HP Stream 8. We didn't see any in the Microsoft store but it's up on their page for sale.

There's not going to be really any difference in real-world top end performance between these 1 GB and 2 GB Atom devices in my experience. The big difference will be in responsiveness in running and switching between apps. The 1 GB will do a lot more memory swapping and it's noticeable but the experience is perfectly useable.

I just picked up a HP Stream 7 from Microsofts store last week (on sale 79.99, and has a $25 microsoft store gift card on it + a free year of office 365). This device is pretty neat. I thought it would be like my first gen windows phone, just kinda stuck with crappy windows store apps but nope, this runs a normal 32bit Windows 8.1 OS (Windows 8.1 with Bing) and I can put any of my normal apps on it.

So far I'm loving it, and the price can't be beat.