HP Slatebook 10 X2 review

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.