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Pros
Good range of tilt angles. Speedy boot and wake times. Don't have to worry about Windows malware. Wide viewing angles and bright screen.
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Cons
8GB is too little local storage space. 1GB isn't enough RAM. Browser is optimized for mobile sites. Kludgy SD card slot. Fonts are huge. No accelerometer for games. Laggy touch screen.
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Bottom Line
The HP Slate 21 is a promise that Android will work for desktop PC users as well as it does for tablet users, with a nice price. The system fails on both counts.
The HP Slate 21 ($399) is a product in search of a certain user. That user pines for the kludgy early days of mobile operating systems when only certain things worked right, and only if you were patient. It's an all-in-one desktop PC that runs Android Jelly Bean, and while that's an admirable trait for the anti-Windows folk, in reality, using the Slate 21 is a painful experience that really only works for very few tasks and leaves you asking why this product exists.
Design and Features
The white plastic chassis of the Slate 21 measures about 14 by 21 by 3 inches (HWD), which is relatively compact for an all-in-one desktop PC. The system comes with an easel-style arm on the back, which can tilt down from 15 to 70 degrees, which puts it in a position where using the touch screen is comfortable for either seated or standing users. The 21.5-inch touch screen has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution IPS panel and two-point optical touch sensor. This is similar to, if less sophisticated than, the five-point optical sensor in the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 23-F260XT AIO. In use, the touch sensor works okay for games like Fruit Ninja, but at times it seemed like the touch sensor wasn't tracking our fingers quite fast enough. The screen itself is very clear and visually flawless, but as you'll see below, that high resolution introduces its own problems.
The system comes fitted with an Nvidia Tegra 4 processor, 1GB of DDR3 system memory, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, and 8GB of SSD-based storage. It runs Google's Android Jelly Bean OS (4.2.2), rather than Microsoft's Windows 8, which is found on budget all-in-one PCs like the HP Pavilion 20-b010z and our current Editors' Choice for entry-level all-in-one desktops, the Gateway One ZX4970G-UW308. This introduces benefits and drawbacks. The major benefit is that the Android operating system is efficient, so boot times and load times are fast. Android also fits on the smallish 8GB SSD, which also adds to speeds. Another benefit is that the system isn't susceptible to Windows based viruses and malware, though any web-based phishing attempts can still trip you and your digital ID up. The big drawback to this setup is that the system isn't Windows compatible, so you can't use the millions of programs written for Windows PCs.
Another drawback is the fact that the system's browser defaults to mobile versions of websites, most of which look ridiculous when viewed in landscape mode instead of portrait mode. Also, mobile websites tend to blow up the size of the typography on the site, so you'll be scrolling a lot. This is an obvious (and ugly) disadvantage when you have a 21-inch 1080p HD screen to work with. For example, when we tried to get to Facebook on the Slate 21, it only let us on to the mobile version of Facebook, which is optimized for four-inch screens. Each post and picture on Facebook was blown up to full-screen width, which meant that you could see spinach in your relative's teeth since their faces are blown up to larger than real life. This was the case in the Android browser, Chrome, and using the native Android Facebook app. As many tablet users know, you can't force the desktop version of Facebook to show up unless you use a third-party browser that fools Facebook into believing it's a real desktop browser like IE.
Things were worse when we tried to access heavy HTML 5 websites like our sister website's Museum of Mario (Mario.ign.com), which dropped frames, had background audio issues, crashed both browsers, and generally didn't work right. We're surmising that this is due to the paltry 1GB of system memory on the Slate 21, since the website worked fine on an Acer C7 Chromebook (C710-2457) , which has 4GB of memory. Last, but not least, Netflix worked fine using the Android app (which doesn't support multiple users yet), but when we tried to view Amazon Instant Video in either browser, it wouldn't let us because of the lack of Flash and Silverlight support.
Other Hewlett-Packard Desktops
By Joel Santo Domingo
Lead Analyst
Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes...
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Twitter: @JoelSD
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By Sascha Segan
Lead Analyst, Mobile
PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...
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