PSA H.P Stream

[mbryant]

So a few months ago I was looking for a nice budget laptop to take along to work with me on my 10 hour shifts. I settled on the HP Stream and I must say I was entirely underwhelmed. I wasn't expecting much from it but I got even less. The following is a script from a video review I was going to do on it. 

 

24 hours with the HP Stream Review

 

Why did I buy the stream? Well I will admit it was a bit of an impulsive purchase. My Macbook is almost dead and it constantly freezes up, so it’s really not worth trying to work on. I bought the Stream because I needed something to work on that wasn’t my phone, or a tablet. I’m really picky when it comes to what I feel I can “work” on. I love mobile operating systems but I can’t do any more than review a document or add a few sentences here and there. I needed something with a decent sized screen and was also small enough to take on the go. While I did briefly consider an Asus transformer tablet I decided against it as the screen was too small. 10 inch tablets are great but I run into the same problem that I do with my phone which is the screen size.

The stream has a pretty fair tradeoff when it comes to the display. The size is perfect, but the color reproduction and viewing angles leave something to be desired. It had terrible contrast and would be horrendous if it were used outdoors.  Also for $40 more you can pickup a touch screen version of the stream which if you can afford it I would suggest you get it.

Now on to hardware. I wasn’t too impressed by the RAM, seeing as other laptops in the $300 plus price range offer 4 gigs as compared to the Stream’s 2GB. The Stream had enough power to do what I need it to do, however if there was an option to upgrade to 4GB I would do so without hesitation.

The storage capacity also leaves something to be desired, it comes with 32GB of internal storage with only around 20GB being usable out of the box. Don’t quote me on that as I have installed several applications at the time of writing this video. The lack of storage is made up for with the 1TB of cloud storage you get with it.

The processor is a dual core Intel® Celeron® N2840 clocked at 2.16Ghz with a 1mb cache. There isn’t much to be said here other than I was expecting less from it than what I got. At least initially.

 

The Stream also features 1 USB 3 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a microSD card reader, 3.5mm headphone out, and HDMI out. The keyboard is better than decent, I wouldn’t call it the best keyboard ever but with the chicklet style keys it reminds me of the macbook keyboards. The trackpad hasn’t really impressed me, it has gestures such as pinch to zoom, swipe in from the left to switch between apps, from the right to bring up the charms bar, and so on. I find these gestures to be very finicky. Often times I will try to move my cursor and I swipe to a different application. Of course you can turn this feature off if you like. The stream also comes LOADED with bloatware such as tripadvisor, snapfish, amazon, and a bunch of HP utilities that you really don’t need.  

I have run into some issues with the Stream most of which are very minor. The biggest issue has been with the audio, 95% of the time the audio is fine, but on occasion it will pop and crackle and there will be some sort of “sound warping”. This only lasts a second or two, but I really don’t want to have that be something I just live with. I checked HP’s help center and noticed that other people have had this same issue, one user even said they had experienced this on other laptops in this price range.

Video playback was sub-par, It handled 720p with no fuss, but try to push it to 1080p and it’s a struggle. Even Netflix had trouble with playback, and while I was doing the testing for video playback I was within 15 feet of the router, as I was trying to get the best results while trying to create a “day to day use” scenario.

 

All in all the HP Stream is a great buy if you are looking for a machine to do basic word processing and web browsing, if you plan on doing ANY more than that then I suggest you save your money and get something better. You might be able to enjoy the occasional youtube video but I would not recommend using the stream for video content.

 

[xTrixieHD]

ffs think about the people using dark theme. i can't read black

[AlwaysFSX]

The only thing you need to know about HP is that it stands for Hilariously Pathetic. Sorry you had to deal with that thing.

 

ffs think about the people using dark theme. i can't read black

It's better than gray..

[Virtual01]

Sounds about right. Whenever a customer at Best Buy asks about the stream the first words out of my mouth are "Don't buy that". A lot of them don't listen. Some poor girl had her parents buy her one as a main computer for college. May god have mercy on her soul.

[ShadowCaptain]

I actually really like the stream.. as long as the person buying it understands the limitations, its perfectly functional

Heck my £60 8" windows tablet with 1gb of ram handles things fine, I was playing HL1 on it yesterday

[mbryant]

The only thing you need to know about HP is that it stands for Hilariously Pathetic. Sorry you had to deal with that thing.

Yeah what was even better was the fact that frys launched like a mini investigation asking me why I was returning it, as if I had to justify not liking it or it being just a piece of garbage.