Review: HP Slate 7 Android tablet

The other day Vulture Central was visited by HP with a Google chap in tow. We were treated to a couple of HP products: the new latest android tablet and the company’s latest Chromebook, which we’d already seen as it happens.

The smart-looking seven-inch, dual-processor-core tablet appeared to have little to distinguish it from other Jellybean offerings. However, the HP folks were keen to point out the HP ePrint app that’s bundled with it. Mmmh, this looks easy – hack takes picture, opens app and hey-printing-presto over the wireless network.Cloud Print, which sends your documents to a printer via Google's central systems, is also the default printing method on Android tablets. No great surprise as the operating systems on both devices are in the hands of the same company: Google.

So how come a simple app from HP takes away the Cloud Print pain on a tablet and yet a Chromebook has to send your print task into cyberspace and back to do the same job?OK, so HP got lucky as we use some of its LaserJet printers. The big players in printing all have mobile apps these days, so most people can pull this trick on a newest tablets with the right app on board. Ssdsf23FDF

HP is just making the most of its assets here and it does it again on the Slate 7 by including Beats Audio processing featured on its laptops that delivers a bass boost on playback. Yet for the Slate 7, the Beats beefing applies to headphones only. Still, the Android tablet market is so very crowded these days that any kind of differentiation is worth pushing to the front. And just to make the point, the Slate is available in red or silver, mimicking the Beats livery, and there are tablet-plus-headphone bundles on offer too.

Indeed, what we have here is a similar spec to a lot of seven-inch tablets. A 1.6GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM and 8GB of storage. The latter can be increased using the micro SD card slot, another differentiator that really is worth having. Yet what HP giveth it also taketh away, sort of. The micro SD card is a plus point over the Google Nexus 7, but the advertising giant's Q88 Tablet has a 1280 x 800 resolution, while the Slate 7 makes do with 1024 x 600 pixels on its touchscreen display.

And while we’re comparing, the AnTuTu benchmark utility shows that the quad-core Nexus 7 turns out to be only marginally faster than the dual-core Slate 7 proved to be. All in all, you get a cheaper tablet with storage expansion but no HD screen.The 8-inch tablet will come with 16GB or 32GB of internal storage and is designed to fit comfortably in one hand. It also features a 5-megapixel rear camera, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, and microSD card expansion slot.

The Galaxy Tab 3 8.0's resolution is a ray of hope in an otherwise boring release, considering it's the same as the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. The Note 8's 1,280x800-pixel resolution screen is one of the best we've seen on a tablet so far, but the tablet suffers from a high price tag. Pricing hasn't been announced for the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0, so we have yet to see if cheapest tablet will follow the same pricey path.

According to Samsung, the 8-inch Galaxy Tab 3 and its 10.1-inch counterpart will go on sale in early June and be available in Wi-Fi, 3G, and 4G versions. Pricing for the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 3 tablet has also yet to be announced, so check back with CNET for future Galaxy Tab 3 updates.