MWC 2013: HP takes on the 7-inch Android tablet market with the Slate 7

Hewlett-Packard has decided to go the Android way with the Jelly Bean-powered, 7-inch HP Slate 7, which the company unveiled recently at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. The device is set to hit the market sometime in April for $169.99 (around Rs 9,221), which makes it a shade cheaper than Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD.

It wasn't long after HP’s love affair with Google bore the Pavilion Chromebook when rumours of an Android tablet started floating around, pointing to a launch post the Mobile World Congress. The Slate 7 has come up a few days earlier than expected, but its specs aren't as great as we'd thought.

The Slate 7 runs on an ARM dual-core Cortex A9 1.6GHz processor and has 1GB of RAM. It features a FFS+LCD touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, which the company claims offers wide viewing angles.

HP's first Android device - Slate 7

The tablet weighs 368gm and will ship with 8GB of onboard memory, expandable via microSD. It has a 3 megapixel camera at the back and a VGA one at the front. HP says that Slate 7's battery will last for about five hours of video playback. The Slate 7 will come packed with Beats Audio processing for better sound quality.

Earlier this month, HP unveiled the 14-inch Pavilion Chromebook in line with their efforts to push the Google experience. Quite like the Slate 7, the Pavilion Chromebook also offers lukewarm specs. It features a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU and 2GB of RAM, which may let it perform a tad better than the Samsung model but it is still not going to be blazing fast.

The Chromebook has 16GB of built-in flash storage and a 14-inch diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It also offers 100GB of Google Drive space free for the first two years.

We had rumours of the tablet being one of the first to ship with NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 chip, but the Slate 7 has turned out to be a middle-of-the-road device that fails to impress—at least on paper. Selling for $30 less than the Nexus 7 and having one camera more might tilt things slightly in Slate 7’s favour, but with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a thinner and lighter body and double the storage space, the Nexus 7 is clearly the winner here.