HP Slatebook 10 X2 review

The HP Slatebook 10 x2 is a sub-£400 tablet with a keyboard dock, which immediately puts in contest with the Asus Transformer range. Given Asus’s head start, HP needs to pack in some pretty impressive hardware, and at first glance it appears to have delivered.

The 10.1in Slatebook 10 x2 is powered by Nvidia’s incredibly powerful Tegra 4, a quad-core processor paired with a fifth power-saving core intended to reduce battery drain when the tablet isn’t in use. The chip’s more than capable of running Android smoothly. In fact, it’s among the fastest Android devices we’ve tested, completing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in just 699.1ms. Interestingly, the Slatebook 10 x2 does fall slightly short of other Tegra 4 tablets.

The fifth power-saving core kicked in during our video rundown test, but it couldn’t help the Slatebook x2 achieve more than eight hours and six minutes on a single charge. That was without using the extra battery built into the keyboard dock. With the dock attached the Slatebook managed 11 hours 54 minutes hours, which is a much better performance. However, the Tegra 4-based Asus Transformer Pad TF701T lasted 15 hours and 17 minutes with its keyboard dock attached.

As for graphics processing, the Slatebook 10 x2 scored 13,220 in 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, which puts it behind other Tegra 4-based tablets such as the Advent Vega Note, but that score still beats the vast majority of devices. Real Racing 3, one of our most demanding Android games, showed no sign of frame rate drops or stuttering. This means you should have no trouble playing games with the Slatebook 10 x2.

The Slatebook’s 1,920×1,200-resolution screen uses a 10.1in IPS panel that produces reasonable viewing angles, but almost everything else about the display is disappointing. The glossy finish makes it almost impossible to see what’s on screen in direct sunlight, especially as the backlight produces a disappointingly low peak brightness of 225.7cd/m2. This is far below what we’d deem suitable for outdoor use. It’s a shame, as in darker environments colours look rather vibrant and contrast is decent enough. Images and text look sharp in isolation, but the 2560×1,440 resolutions of competing tablets put it to shame.

The Slatebook itself is very much a dilution of HP’s laptop designs, with a slate grey finish on the rear and contrasting black screen bezel. Connectivity is limited, just a microSD card slot and 3.5mm audio jack on the bottom of the tablet. You must attach the keyboard dock to get an HDMI video output and full-size USB port. The keyboard dock also a 3.5mm audio jack and SD card slot, as those on the tablet are obscured by the docking mechanism. Frustratingly, there’s no microUSB port to connect the tablet to a PC for file transfers, so you have to copy files to a USB flash drive first and then save them to the tablet. This also means you must lug the proprietary charger around with you.

The camera sensor on the rear of the tablet is a disappointingly low two megapixels in size, and it produces grainy images that lack detail in all but the most well-lit scenes. The Slatebook can record 1080p video at 30 frames per second, but it struggles with anything except well-lit, slow moving objects. The front-facing webcam has an even lower resolution, but it should be fine for video calls.

The keyboard dock adds a significant amount of weight to the tablet, doubling it from 630g to 1.31kg. The extra weight is mainly due to the extra internal battery, but also because of the stiff hinge that holds the tablet in place. The system shuts just like a laptop, so the screen is protected in transit.

HP has a knack for squeezing large keyboards into small laptops, but the Slatebook x2 still proved tricky to type on. The keys are roughly 90 per cent of full size and our hands felt cramped. The keys themselves have plenty of travel and are springy enough to bounce back into place quickly. We also appreciated the selection of Android shortcuts, which let you navigate the user interface and control multimedia playback.

The widescreen all-in-one touchpad was less impressive. Android was built for a touchscreen, so it’s no surprise that the mouse cursor feels sluggish and unresponsive. It isn’t as if HP has tweaked Android with its own custom interface to better suit mouse input, either, as the Slatebook users the default Android interface. There’s a fair amount of preinstalled apps that we’d rather not have, and can’t uninstall them completely. Thankfully you can disable most apps, and prevent them from running or appearing in the app drawer.

The Slatebook x2 is a very powerful Android tablet, with the benefit of a bundled keyboard for faster text entry, but the Asus Transformer Pad TF701T trumps it with a higher resolution 2,560×1,440 display and expanded connectivity. The TF701T costs more, but the superior picture quality and longer battery life arguably make it worth the extra cost.