HP first entered the Android tablet market with the Slate 7 and frankly, it didn’t cut it. It launched with specs from the previous year with today’s price tag. Still, everyone has to start somewhere and the Slate 7 Extreme from HP was a decent, if a little pricey, offering and now, they’re back offering perhaps the cheapest tablet from a big name manufacturer the HP 7 Plus. We’re not sure what makes this ‘Plus’, but for $99.99 direct from HP, there’s certainly worse out there.
So, what do you get for your hundred bucks? Well, you get a 7-inch 1024 x 600 display, a 1 GHz quad-core Allwinner A31 ARM Cortex-A7 processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. As with all bargain tablets, don’t expect this guy to have great battery life as this guy features just a 2,800 mAh battery. Nice touches such as a rear-facing camera (even if it is a 2-megapixel one) as well as a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a microSD card slot. So, for just $100, this is certainly not the worse budget tablet out there.
With a bezel bigger than pretty much any other 7-incher out there, the HP 7 Plus comes in at 7.6″ x 4.8″ 0.32″ and weighs a chunky 10.4 Oz. To see HP release such a tablet is certainly interesting and we’re sure that they’ll sell quite a few of them, if just out of curiosity, but for those looking for a first tablet this isn’t a lot of money to spend. Sure, this isn’t the best device out there by far, but for browsing the web and some light video watching, we’re sure this will do a lot of people just fine. The Nexus 7 is obviously far more capable than this, but it’s also three times as expensive, for a lot of people it might not be three times better. It’s available directly from HP’s website and appears to come in just one color, silver.
