HP has officially unveiled its new Stream 7 and Stream 9 tablets that will finally allow consumers to enjoy a full Windows 8 experience on a budget.
More often than not, consumers looking for an affordable tablet don't have many choices but to go for Android slates from various OEMs. HP has launched cheap Android tablets of its own, but now the company wants to deliver Windows 8 on the cheap with its latest Stream 7 and Stream 8 tablets.
"The HP Stream 7 and HP Stream 8 Windows tablets keep customers connected to work, friends and content all at an exceptional value," the company touted in its press release on Monday, Sept. 29.
HP has yet to offer full specifications for these two new tablets, but it did slip a few details. The Stream 7 and Stream 8 slates will pack quad-core Intel processors under the hood and will come with plenty of cloud storage, which suggests that internal storage capacity will be low. As their names suggest, the two slates will come with 7- and 8-inch screens, respectively. The two tablets will come with 1TB of OneDrive cloud space, as well as a one-year free subscription for Microsoft's Office 365 Personal. A Skype bonus of 60 minutes per month is also on board to sweeten the deal.
The HP Stream 8 seems to be the more interesting model, as it has one intriguing feature for this budget category of Windows tablets: 4G connectivity. In fact, HP is actually enticing potential buyers with 200MB of free 4G data per month, which will last for the whole life of the tablet.
In terms of pricing and availability, the new HP Stream 7 tablet will come with a $99.99 price tag, while the 4G LTE-enabled HP Stream 8 with 200MB of monthly data will have a $149.99 starting price. HP has yet to offer exact launch dates and purchase locations for its new Stream tablets, but more information is expected to become available shortly.
In the meantime, you can check out the new HP Stream 7 on the company's website here, and the HP Stream 8 at this link. The company is also allowing interested customers to sign up and receive email notifications regarding the devices' availability as they get closer to launch.
