HP Slate 7 Android tablet now available for $170

In February we saw that HP was re-entering the Android tablet space officially with the HP Slate 7. They talked about an April launch and we weren’t sure it would happen. However, it it is now available to order directly from HP for a very cool $169.99. Coming it at just barely above the kindle Fire and $30 less than the Nexus 7. Will it be worth the price differences though and will people flock to the slightly less expensive HP tablet?

Just looking over the specs as compared to the Nexus 7, there are some clear differences that would account for the $30 difference. Both are 7-inch screens. The HP Slate 7 is WVA at 1024 x 600, while our Nexus 7 is a IPS display at 1280 x 800. Pretty drastic screen difference. The Slate took a hit in the battery department also, getting a 3,500 mAh battery rated at 5 hours of video playback where as the N7 is toting in a 4325 mAh battery with 8 hours of constant use. The processor of the Slate is a dual-core A9 while the N7 packs the Tegra 3 Quad-Core processor. Memory wise, The Slate has 8GB internal, but it does have an SD card slot for another 32GBs of storage. They have the N7 there. You can also forget about NFC. The Slate is at least running Android 4.1.

Sounds like quite a number of corners were cut in order to bring this tablet to the market at the price point they aimed it at. I could personally live with the smaller battery and no NFC if HP could have put a little more inside spec wise. For the $30 difference, I don’t see this being a huge hit in areas that a Nexus 7 is available. The video of it in action doesn’t look to bad though. I guess I was just expecting more.

What do you guys think? You can go check it out on HP’s site.

Via 9to5Google