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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
For less than TI sells a calculator.
I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.
You might want to be a bit careful, some of the ultra-cheap Windows devices are UEFI only; but 32 bit, which freaks most Linux installers out; but these are not Windows RT machines, so they will not be cryptographically locked out.
Time, and experimentation, will tell how good compatibility actually is; but it should be markedly easier than any Windows RT device, and honestly quite probably easier than doing a Linux port to a lot of common Android devices(yes, bodging a headless debian userland or something onto an Android system is easy; but getting X, using a mainline kernel, or not using bionic, less so...)
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.
The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...
I've got the Asus transformerbook T100. It's a tablet that runs full fat windows 8.1 No fans. Charges USB. I get 8-10 hours of use out of it between charges. (Comes with a detachable keyboard/trackpad which is nice. Also has HDMI out)
It's not as nice as, say, an ipad but it's a full windows machine and it costs half what an ipad does. Since Intel introduced the baytrail Atom they really have been able to make machines that operate in a no-bullshit tablet power enevlope.
That's not the issue: Since virtually all (x86) systems built later than 2010 are 64-bit, the expected case is 64 bit UEFI. Contemporary linux distributions don't even bat an eye at booting on a 64-bit system with 64-bit UEFI (well, there are a lot of ugly details under the surface, probably enough to keep several devs more or less permanently alcoholic; but the user doesn't need to see that).
However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.
There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.
The $35 ones I bought were dual core, 1024mb ram, 2g internal storage, 10 point capacitive touch, with a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32gig card.
So far they play all the games and run just about anything we care to put on them. Though We use them for browsing and as the remote control for the OpenElec XBMC/Raspberry Pi units.