HP Stream 11 review: Still a great bargain

The HP Stream 11 was first launched in 2015 and it wowed us with its combination of a low price, excellent usability and the inclusion of a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office365. It’s still available, nearly two years later, and it’s even more of a bargain now, with the price having fallen from £180 to a measly £150.

At the time, we compared it with the Asus EeeBook X205TA, a laptop we preferred for its even lower price and lighter weight, but you can’t buy that machine anymore, and since the HP Stream 11 still represents a great value way to lay your hands on a full-blown Windows 10 machine it remains one of a great choice.

You can read our original HP Stream 11 review below.

HP STREAM 11 REVIEW: DESIGN AND BUILD

The Stream 11 is available in three colours in the UK: grey, pink and the blue model we had for review. The lid is made from one solid colour, but the palm rest and keyboard tray have a dotted pattern and blue gradient that, together, look strikingly like the skin of a tropical fish. It’s perhaps a bit toy-like for our tastes, but whether it’s too garish for you will be down to personal preference. Build quality is great for the price, with the chassis not giving way to our prods and attempts to bend it. It’s much heavier than the Asus EeeBook X205TA, though: the HP’s 1.3kg is a noticeable step up from the 980g Asus.

The keyboard is good, too. It fills up most of the keyboard tray with very small borders on the left and right, meaning it’s spacious enough for people with fairly large hands. The white, island-style keys have a reasonable amount of travel and felt comfortable enough to type on for extended periods. Taps and swipes on the touchpad are responsive, too, although we had problems with the physical buttons. If you perform a physical click at the bottom-middle of the touchpad, you won’t get a left or right-click in Windows; you get nothing at all. This will be a problem for users who are used to using the bottom of their touchpads for clicking and isn’t something we see very often, which is frustrating.

The Stream 11 one-ups the Asus EeeBook X205TA in terms of connectivity with a USB3 port in addition to a second regular USB port. This is useful for transferring large files from USB storage devices and even working directly off a high-speed USB hard disk, although you’ll be wasting your year of free Office365 if you do this. There’s also a full-size HDMI port for connecting to a TV or external monitor.

SCREEN

The 1,366×768 pixel screen is usable in most reasonable conditions, although working outdoors will be a struggle as the backlight isn’t very bright. Colour coverage is a meagre 62.1% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is admittedly still better than the Asus, and contrast is rated at 325:1. Horizontal viewing angles are reasonably wide, and with a bit of hinge adjustment, the viewing experience is perfectly adequate for such a cheap laptop.

WINDOWS 8.1 AND THE CLOUD

One year of Microsoft Office365 is included with every Stream 11. This also includes 1TB of OneDrive storage, although you’ll have to budget £60 after the first year when the subscription expires if you want to continue using it. Office365 includes Microsoft Office Online, which is an excellent web-based suite with more features than Google’s Docs. If you’d prefer, you can also install the desktop version of the Office suite on your PC as Office365 includes a one-year licence for this, too.

You’ll need to get used to working in the Cloud: with a Spartan 32GB of onboard storage this is about as close to a Chromebook you can get without actually buying one. Windows 8.1 isn’t quite as well suited to working in the cloud as Chrome OS is, although it’s fairly easy to set up folders to synchronise with OneDrive in Windows.

HP hasn’t completely clogged up its laptop with unwanted software, either, although we strongly advise you uninstall the McAfee security suite immediately because it’s intrusive and causes huge performance problems.

PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY

Perhaps the biggest difference between the HP Stream 11 and the Asus EeeBook X205TA is the choice of processors. While the EeeBook uses a quad-core Intel Atom chip, HP has opted for a 2.16GHz dual-core Intel Celeron N2840. While neither laptop is particularly fast, the Celeron is actually a little quicker when it comes to single-core focused tasks, such as basic web browsing. It scored 30 in our old benchmarking tests, 13 more than the Asus. Its overall benchmark score of 15 is four points less than the Asus, though, which is largely due to our benchmark’s multi-core focus that favours processors with more cores. However, because you should only expect to be doing simple tasks on a budget laptop, the faster single-core speed of the HP Stream 11 makes it a better overall proposition. It could only manage 8 overall in our new benchmarks, but we didn’t test the Asus in these conditions so can’t make direct comparisons.

Battery life is great; we managed to get 7h35m in our moderate usage test, so if you’re conservative with screen brightness and media consumption you could realistically get through a full working day.

CONCLUSION

It’s a close-run thing between the HP Stream 11 and the Asus EeeBook X205TA. The Stream 11 has a small performance advantage thanks to its higher clock speed, and the screen is marginally better. However, this comes with a significant 300g weight penalty. Either way, both of the laptops are a steal at £180 and are well worth your cash if you’re on a budget. If the Stream 11 doesn’t quite fit your needs then check out our regularly-updated Best Laptops and buying guide.

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