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HP Introduces Sub-$100 Windows Tablet
jfruh writes While Windows-based tablets haven't exactly set the world on fire, Microsoft hasn't given up on them, and its hardware partners haven't either. HP has announced a series of Windows tablets, with the 7-inch low-end model, the Stream 7, priced at $99. The Stream brand is also being used for low-priced laptops intended to compete with Chromebooks (which HP also sells). All are running Intel chips and full Windows, not Windows RT.
sort of want
I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.
-- My Weblog.
For less than TI sells a calculator.
If it can handle media-heavy social websites, then I think this would be a winner for my wife and others like her.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen
I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?
HP is using the Stream brand for both laptops and tablets.
I guess Microsoft's plan to charge nothing for small screen form factors is having a bit on a effect. Even 20 bucks would be a significant impact on that price. At that price, there'd be enough people to see if you get a Linux distro on it, and it's close enough to cheap android levels.
For me, it's cool, because I'm more versed in Windows development and since it's full Windows, I can easily install whatever the heck I want on it (no developer unlock, etc, etc). Save up, get a few and just have them around the house.
That's kind of funny, actually. Wonder what genius thought there was a usable market segment for a tablet without a touchscreen?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?
Mount it on the wall above your desk, plug in a keyboard and mouse, and use it as a cheap PC.
Two different product lines: one is cheapy laptops(and since a touchscreen adds a nontrivial hit to the BOM, these don't come with them) and the other is inexpensive 7 and 8 inch tablets (which do have touchscreens, since they don't have keyboards or touchpads).
You might want to check your reading skills. The laptop version does not have a touchscreen unless you request it and pay the difference...
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Somewhere in the world is the person who keeps posting this on Slashdot. Somewhere in a bunker chock full of old and new hardware wired up in to Beowulf clusters of Beowulf clusters that is a Beowulf cluster. Then one day the mother of all Beowulf clusters awakens, " I think we can put our differences behind us... for science..."
Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.
That was a bit confusing but I think you are mistaken. The article is talking about them announcing new tablets AND laptops. I think they are just pointing out that the laptops wont have a touch screen, but the tablets the OP is about will have one.
The Stream laptops won't have a touchscreen by default, not the tablets.
But it potentially COULD be perfect for a single app -- think nurses in hospitals tracking meds and blood pressures, people doing inventories, etc. One of these days, the right hardware is going to come out and people are going to start standardizing on it for simple data entry and checklist type operations.
Why is this considered informative? The sentence you quoted clearly said "laptops" not "tablets".
No one. Their own quote explicitly said "laptops".
Could we please, at least on this site where people are supposed to have at least little better clue of mathematics than the average population, round prices intelligently and not fall for that bloody '99$ is not 100 !" ?!?
I don't think that anyone would use the exact price tag for a laptop of, say, 699$ rather than 700$...
So, this is a 100$ tablet for all practical purposes and now get off my lawn you stupid advertisement goons !
Of course they are mistaken. The quote said laptops.
There's also a $81 tablet coming from PiPO.
"Pipo" means "beanie" in Finnish, by the way, hehheh.
Nobody did.
There are Stream tablets, and Stream laptops. The GP even quotes the part which says laptops.
A tablet without a touch screen is basically an etch a sketch. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
99 is not sub $100
Do you use some sort of alternate number line and an alternate version of English?
When oh when is Microsoft going to get it through their heads that people DO NOT WANT to run Office on tablets, plug-in keyboard or no.
Reading is hard! Let's go shopping!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Is 99 more than 100?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Those who know binary and those who don't.
$99.99 is not sub $100, with %8.25 tax, or $5 shipping and handling, or any add on to the cost. :P
It is 1 penny less than $100 so most smart people round up.
I wonder if there are other ways to make the $99.99 into $100 hmmm
If you just want to run a single touchscreen app on a cheap tablet, why would you want Windows?
A full windows install with Intel chips isn't exactly tuned for mobile battery performance.
So will these things have an exceedingly short battery life?
And I'm betting they will have so little memory as to be unusable -- because Windows with anything less than 4G is a complete dog in my experience.
I predict a terrible product on this one.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ever tried to use a touch screen while wearing those blue Nitrile surgical gloves? The ones that make your hands stink?
Not only is the screen not exactly responsive any more, but you have to disinfect it after every use. Not just at the end of a shift, but between every patient you come into contact with.
I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room. So I left it out, and tried using it with gloves, figuring I'd disinfect it later. Hint - touch screens don't work so well with gloves, but at least it let me see who was texting/calling, and disinfecting it before I left wasn't that big a deal.
Hospitals are a huge source of infections, despite efforts to disinfect everything in sight.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I bought a very nice 32GB, 10" HP Touchpad for $150 three years ago. It runs the latest Android and is my daily driver, does everything I want - email, browsing, Netflix, good battery, etc. Bluetooth keyboard if you want it.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
There is no shortage of jerks with GIANT 5.1 inch smart phones wanting to open office attachments on them what makes you think that a 7 or 8 inch tablet would be any different?
"Hey, the 80s called they want their GIANT PHONE back."
That's because Capacitive touch screens require a capacitive surface to work. You could use a stylus with a special tip for these rare circumstances.
They might want to run a reader app (similar to Adobe Reader) that would format 100% correctly.
I don't even want to buy Office for a desktop if they're going to keep going with subscription service.
Why? Works fine on my Surface 2 RT.
Perhaps because you already have the windows program that does what you need, and it's a lot easier to update the interface than port it to Android?
Or perhaps because if you dock it with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you suddenly transform it into a low-power desktop system without having to do any inter-device coordination? (My own intended use-case, though I'll admit I currently have no reason to believe these tablets will include an HDMI port, which is kind of essential to the vision.)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'll buy (may swtich to Linux) if it has a micro HDMI output so I can dock the thing at a real monitor (1960*1200 min). I've been looking around to tablets as desktop replacements and found relatively few x86 with HDMI out.
Who modded a post that fails at elementary school math informative?
In a world where people throw away pennies or leave them lying on the street 99.99 is 100.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
>Hospitals are a huge source of infections, despite efforts to disinfect everything in sight.
Arguably to some extent because of efforts to disinfect everything in sight. The result being that any infection you pick up has a good chance of being drug resistant. The problem with multiple drug resistant (i.e. virtually untreatable) infections was getting so bad in some hospitals in... the Netherlands I think it was... that they decided to stop disinfecting entirely. Instead they went back to the old fashioned approach of *cleaning* things thoroughly - remove the germs from the environment and it doesn't matter if they're dead or not. Those hospitals are now the safest in the world when it comes to infections. Infection rates are down, and there is no longer any trace of the drug resistant strains so if you do pick up an infection it's easily treatable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Laptop != tablet. They're two separate devices.
So now you have yet another thing to carry around and disinfect.
Easier to just put a keyboard and screen in every room. Keyboards are easy to use, and there are keyboard protectors that can be easily disinfected. The screens are larger, so it's a lot easier to see all the necessary data, including what precautions to take, special requirements such as "do not give liquids orally", the patient's schedule if they are seeing specialists for physio or a checkup, etc.
Changing gloves between patients is already the norm. Having to disinfect a tablet and stylus between patients is going add more time lost between patients, raising costs and lowering effectiveness. Not every problem is suited for a tablet.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to 'update the interface' of an existing Windows program to make it work on a touchscreen device as a Metro app. That's more or less a total rewrite - and that's where Microsoft went off the rails with Windows 8. They wanted a 'clean' touchscreen OS, so they essentially started from scratch with the application layer. But then they tried to sell it as 'the Windows you know and love'. But you need desktop mode for it to be that. Desktop mode stinks on tablets, tablet mode stinks on the Desktop, and they were too late to market to get their tablet API's established. So you're stuck with full Windows (tablet + desktop) on a 7" device where desktop will be more or less unusable, and tablet won't have any apps. But it's cheap.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Yes, but will it bend? Certainly this must be the stupid meme for all new tablet / phone announcements.
Or just use resistive touch screens instead of capacitive. They can have screen covers just as easily as a keyboard, or even made to be fully waterproof for easier cleaning.
But that belongs with a full-size touch screen rather than a tablet if there's a lot of data to present. Keyboards are no more easy to disinfect.
A tablet without a touchscreen is an Etch-A-Sketch without the knobs... ;^)
The hospital cleans everything - floors washed multiple times a day, surfaces wiped down on a regular basis, etc. Infections are going to spread because that's what they do. If the patient is contaminated, they're contaminated. If it's a bug that's transmitted by contact, everything they come into contact with has to be assumed to be contaminated. They have a separate pressure cuff and stethoscope reserved for their exclusive use, etc. But still bugs get transmitted. It happens when you put a large amount of sick people, many of them weakened or immuno-compromised, together. And many of those bugs are already out in the wild, not just confined to hospitals.
Some things, like electronic devices, you can't just throw in the laundry or wash down. They need disinfecting.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"HP... wants to offer a range of products to meet different needs..."
Understatement of the century. I think HP has more SKUs than customers.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Last time they had a $99 tablet they sold like mad. This should work out well. :D
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room.
You also can just not answer your phone right away.
Kind of hard to do when the rest of the family wants to be kept up to date on what's happening to someone who in the space of a month had a quintuple bypass, two strokes that left them paralyzed on one side, cognitive problems, etc., and you want to give the patient feedback from them that everyone's rooting for them, and is there anything they need?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Microsoft has a long history of over-promising, and under-delivering.
This has been going on for decades: "don't buy our competitor's product! We are just about to release something that completely blows it out of the water!" Then Microsoft starts pushing back the delivery date, changing prices, dropping features, and so on.
I have a Surface 2 RT as well, and although I don't open many office documents with it, I find that it's much nicer than any tablet I've used before. Just the fact that you can plug in USB drives, or access network drives natively from any app is a big plus. The browser actually quite good. And the onscreen keyboard is one of the best touch screen keyboards I've had the pleasure of using. There aren't a ton of apps for it, but it has enough apps so I can do the stuff I want to do on a tablet. Plus it's got a really big screen. There are very few 10+ inch tablets out there. And most of them are around the same price as the Surface 2.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
7" is more or less what a $300 phablet is. Of course w/o the phone part. Bum some free WiFi and go to town. Facebook and twitter should give these out for FREE. Of course $99 to run Windows isn't going to be functional for much else but who cares?
The evidence in the Netherlands (?) suggests otherwise. When using disinfecting agents the cleaning tends to be much less thorough, because doctors, nurses, custodians, etc. "know" that any germs that don't get washed away will be killed anyway. Which is of course true, for 99.999% of the germs. The problem is the thousands of germs remaining behind, which were immune to the disinfectant and are likely to pass that immunity to their descendants.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So what? It's still got desktop mode, and if you're only running the one program you won't actually be using the desktop. Just run your one program full screen and update its desktop-API based interface to be more touch-friendly. Problem solved.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It all depends on your application off course, but I'm going to be dare-devil and claim that the GUI is at most half the program.
So, even though you may need to convert the GUI from 'PC' to 'Tablet'; if things are decently written you can still re-use quite a bit of the underlying code/layers and it all is handled nicely in the same dev. environment you're already used to. I do think it has a lot of things going for it.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Putting a 7 on a Windows product is now the key to a successful marketing campaign. I suspect this will be a huge success.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
I'm so glad the netbook concept is dead. Who wants a cheap Windows laptop anyways? (smirk) I suppose these neo-netbooks (nee Stream) will run also-Windows 8.1, probably with a non-settable background image or some other lame-ass mildly crippled feature...
There are phones with resistive screens for people like you. Those work fine with any object that can exert pressure on the screen, gloves or not.
You just have to look out for one.
Full disclosure: I still use an old Nokia with resistive screen myself, one of the reasons being that I like being able to use it outside in winter without having my fingers freeze from taking off gloves and without having to use special gloves with capacitive coating on fingertips. Other being that like most older Nokias, it's a fucking tank that still work well, about 5 years after purchase date.
It concerns me somewhat that it didn't make you stop, think, re-read and understand. Because I surely did and I find it unthinkable that others wouldn't. Scary, even.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That would be a dream!
Or maybe not.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Maybe it's possible to make an existing win32 desktop app more 'touch-friendly', but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help. And the press glommed on to some "desktop is legacy - metro is the future" line, as though everyone were going to automatically do rewrites. Maybe that's what Microsoft was hoping for, and maybe the press is just dumb. But that's certainly not what is happening. What's really happening is "desktop is legacy - web is the future', and any rewrites that are being done are targeting html5/javascript. Whether that's the best future or not, that's what's happening.
Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
If it can I'll buy 6 just to have highschool flashback game nights!
I believe in karma, which is why, when I do something bad to people, I assume they deserve it.
No, $99 is less than $100, but the fact that $99 is less than $100 is irrelevant. The tablet advertised as $99 is not $99 because prices in the United States are typically quoted excluding shipping and sales tax.
I'm so glad the netbook concept is dead.
I disagree.
Who wants a cheap Windows laptop anyways?
I do. I carry a 10" laptop while I commute to and from work on the bus because it fits in a bag that doesn't scream "steal me" the way a full-size laptop bag does. It's a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012 with 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU and 1 GB RAM that runs Xubuntu. But once its second battery pack loses its ability to hold a reasonable charge, I'm looking at replacing it with an ASUS Transformer Book (quad-core Atom, 2 GB RAM) running Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell.
You can always buy it in Oregon.
I got to work on a guy's Surface tablet a couple days ago. While it was nice and very fast, every time I had to do something on the desktop, it was like trying to read the fine print on a TV commercial.
Since Win8, Windows has DPI scaling on the desktop that actually works (actually it was mostly working in Win7 already, but 8 and 8.1 polished it further).
Surface, in particular, scales everything to 150% by default, if I remember correctly. The text on mine is about the same size as on the desktop. Of course, this means that not quite as many things fit, so some people manually change the setting back to 100%, making everything tiny, but fitting more onto the screen. That guy whom you know must have done that.
> ...but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help
And if we were discussing writing a new program from scratch, or even having to port an old one to a new API anyway, that might matter. But we're not, we're discussing making a tablet version of an existing, mature application that is probably still going to be used in a desktop form factor as well (not everyone is going to move to tablets simultaneously, nor will they necessarily stay on them - there's no guarantee that tablets will actually be a good form factor for the purpose). So the options are tweaking the existing GUI for a mature program that is still also be used on desktop systems, versus porting the damn thing to a whole new API.
As for the media, sure, they mostly all jumped on the bandwagon - what does that have to do with real people making business decisions on a limited budget? Anyone who makes business decisions based only on supplier marketing and media buzz deserves to have their business spiral into the ground.
Finally, maybe you're not aware of this, but you can do a lot of "touch friendly" tweaks to the Windows desktop already, such as increasing the button and font size to make controls designed for a mouse cursor considerably easier to manipulate things with a large, bulky fingertip. It doesn't work for everything, but so long as it works for your "killer app" then that let's *you* make the necessary modifications, today, instead of waiting for your supplier to get around to releasing an update - potentially a very major consideration. Especially if the product has been discontinued or the supplier has no plans to tabletify it.
>Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.
True. And if zebras ate meat lions might be scared. When has Microsoft *ever* shown the slightest inclination to create anything other than me-too proprietary solutions?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
the SSD is the equalizer. crap specs are fine, as long as you have an SSD in the mix, performance will be decent. amazing, right?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
What I've heard about those multi-resistant strains is that they can only survive in the squeaky clean environments hospitals provide.
So it seems all you have to do is make hospitals a little less clean, and those multi-resistant strains can't survive there any more and only the more environmentally robust bacteria and viruses remain.
Wonder why they don't use this idea to actually treat those infections. Regular drugs don't work, but a change in environment does... that's an interesting notion, I'd say. Now how to translate this to actual treatment, I wouldn't know, I'm not a doctor.
I spent too much time fiddling w/ a passive stylus on a Fujitsu Point PT-510 --- not that interested in repeating it, but if it had a daylight viewable display so that it could:
- function as a map reader when travelling
- work as a controller for my CNC machine when using it outside (as good as the dust collection is, Ipê gets cut outside)
But I'm not seeing any machines w/ daylight viewable displays available for less than several grand....
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Over a year ago I could pick up sub $100 Android tablets at my local Walmart. And there are actual third party applications that are available for Android. Sub $100 Android tablets make good children's toys.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not to mention almost nobody ever will actually have one of these for less than $100 new and not closeout/clearance. Taxes, shipping, or both. As a question of language I would be happy with $100. I agree that $99 is a distasteful marketing gimmick although I probably wouldn't have bothered to raise the standard for non-psychologically-misleading pricing like you have.