After the total mishandling of it’s Touchpad tablet debacle, HP has slowly tried to re-enter the tablet market. Last year’s Slate 7, followed by the Slate 7 plus, made little impact. And now, HP continues the trend of little impact with an underwhelming device, the HP 8.
Overall it is a very vanilla device, with no outstanding features. For $169.99, you get a device with the Allwinner A31 quad-core processor, along with a reasonable 16gb storage. Android 4.2.2 is your operating system, while the battery, at 3800mAH, is rated at 7 hours of use. The 7.85″ screen has a relatively low resolution of 1024×768, which is actually a good idea, given the processor. 1GB ram is standard on lower end devices, as are the .3MP front and 2MP rear cameras.
So why would you buy this over competing brands? I can’t answer that question. At the same price, you can get a Dell Venue 8, with 2GB ram, 1280×800 screen, an Intel Atom processor(which is better than the Allwinner), better cameras, and GPS. So maybe HP just added this to their website with basically no promotional effort, knowing there was nothing special about it. I didn’t understand HP’s strategy with the Touchpad, and don’t get what they’re trying to do now, with this device. It seems like a half-hearted effort to stay relevant, but it’s not a good tablet by any stretch.