HP ElitePad 900 review: A rugged Win 8 tablet for business road warriors - limaftere1980

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

MILSPEC 810-G tested (should withstand water splashes, dust, and the occasional drop)
Sleek, smart design
Inclusive collection of extract of accessories available
More seven hours of battery life

Cons

Very bumper-to-bumper performance with diligence software
Utmost of 64MB of storage (32MB standard)
No more USB ports on the tablet itself (only on the dock or optional cases)

Our Verdict

A rugged, merely basic tablet offer oodles of nonmandatory accessories, but alone lackluster performance.

The HP ElitePad 900 is a tough son of a tablet. Designed for business or exterior use, it is made-up to survive organism dropped, dinged, dusted, and handled roughly sufficient to make an iPad call. HP has tested it to the military MIL-STD810G standard for debris, vibration, temperatures high and low, humidity, EL, and free fall-proofing for heights of up to 30 inches.

Nigh uber-durable devices end dormie superficial like the punt end of a armoured combat vehicle, but the ElitePad 900 is quite cute. Just 9.2mm thick and deliberation less than 1.4 pounds, with a CNC-milled aluminum back (CNC refers to data processor numerical control in manufacturing), a nominal head that's covered in Gorilla gorilla Glass 2, and rounded corners, this pad of paper is small and sleek sufficiency not to look out of range in the office.

While it is rugged, it's atomic number 102 speed demon: With just a 1.8GHz Intel Atom Z2760 single-core processor and only 2GB of RAM, the ElitePad 900 managed a teeth-grindingly low Notebook Worldbench 8.1 score of 43. That's the worst score we've seen with our updated test suite, and is less than uncomplete of the mark on our reference device, the Asus VivoBook S550CA.

HP's sturdy ElitePad 900 runs Windows 8.

Both volition argue that a tablet shouldn't be compared to a notebook, but the two kinds of hardware really aren't each that different. Essentially, one has a physical keyboard and the past typically doesn't. In this case, much of the ElitePad 900's performance shortcomings come from its reliance on Intel's Atom mainframe (and its integrated GPU), and a dearth of RAM (which the CPU and the integrated GPU must share). This rendered the ElitePad incapable of running any of our game benchmarks.

Graphics performance

We don't anticipate anyone would buy this tablet for gaming, of line, but games are unrivalled of the best measures of art operation, and the ElitePad is decidedly weak on that score. What's more, HP's tablet didn't have the horsepower to play our HD mental test video swimmingly, either. It did manage to play HD YouTube videos, only the sound that emerged from its speakers was thin and tinny. The 1280-past-800-pixel display, then again, delivered good color and brightness: With the backlight cranked up, I measured it at 351 cd/m² (candelas per square metre; I used a Spyder 4 Elite monitor standardization instrument).

You'll need to plug an accessory into the ElitePad 900's trademarked dock to gain USB, HDMI, VGA, or ethernet connectivity.

Storage is on the small side: The model HP transmitted for review has a 64GB SSD, OR you can opt for a slenderly less expensive model with a 32GB SSD. HP uses 3.5GB of that storage for a recovery partition and 100MB to store system tools, going away 41.2GB of free space. Our review unit also included a mobile broadband adaptor that works aboard the dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter. The wideband adapter works with either T-Mobile's OR AT&T's HSPA+ network, but non with the quicker LTE network that AT&T has and that T-Mobile is rolling out.

You get into't get many wired connections to the outside world, though. The tablet offers only a headphone jack, a SIM and microSD card one-armed bandit (under a tightly fitted cover), and a proprietary dock/case connexion. It has no USB or other ports, just the dock connector does allow you to plug in optional accessories, such as an HDMI/VGA adapter ($49), an ethernet adapter ($39), or a USB arranger ($29).

I/O port wine options

HP also offers a neat keyboard case (the company refers to this $249 product as a "productiveness jacket," which power help you justify its expense to the accountants). IT fits around the pad, clamshell mode, and piece IT adds roughly bulge (it's nearly an inch thick and weighs almost a pound), it also provides a number of features, such every bit a virtuous keyboard, with decent-size keys and acceptable travel; two USB ports; and an SDHC card lecturer. The suit also props the tablet up at your choice of three angles, so it sits like a conventional laptop. A connecter on the back of the jacket duplicates the proprietary connector on the bag of the tablet, thus you can use the same adapters for extra USB ports or whole number video outputs. These jackets and adapters are not as clifflike as the tablet, so don't bear them to sail through combat in the same agency.

Though the ElitePad 900 is, as noted, no speed demon, it's fast plenty to run applications such as Word and Excel (as long as you don't do anything too complicated). And the upside to the comportment of an underpowered processor and so little retentiveness is that the pad of paper has fantabulous battery life sentence: In our testing, information technology lasted an impressive 7 hours, 33 transactions. That's less than HP's 10-hr claim, but IT's enough for a full day of work. And if you're planning a longer trip into the lovely, dark, and deep woods, you can extend that time with HP's Expansion Jacket crown with Battery. H.P. claims the jacket crown will extend battery life to 20 hours (we did non examination this claim). The jacket, which also adds two USB 2.0 ports and a HDMI outturn, is priced at $229.

HP giveth, and HP taketh away

The ElitePad 900 is a organized tablet in the purest sense: IT looks unobtrusive, it has good battery life story, and it can handle everyday tasks. HP as wel offers a good number of perks to make IT the great unwashe's lives easier, including a special tool that lets you crack the case to put back OR repair intrinsical components, and a collection of high-end asset-management and deployment tools. But the ElitePad 900 lacks the processing power and memory to rigging complex tasks, and information technology provides really limited storage capacity.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452704/hp-elitepad-900-review-a-rugged-win-8-tablet-for-business-road-warriors.html

Posted by: limaftere1980.blogspot.com