Hewlett Packard (HP) refreshed its Stream line of thin and light devices on Tuesday with two new notebooks and two tablets. These devices will be made available in the United States beginning in November with a starting price of $99.99.
While the company didn't provide any specs, HP revealed that the two laptops will come with 11.6-inch (Stream 11) and 13.3-inch (Stream 13) HD displays with optional touch capabilities. Both feature a dual-core Celeron processor, 32 GB of internal storage and an "innovative" fanless design. These notebooks are also visually striking, arriving in Orchid Magenta and Horizon Blue, complemented by a gradient design.
According to HP, the laptops come with Windows 8.1 backed by Office 365 Personal and 1 TB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage for storing and sharing documents, images, videos and so on. The Stream 11 includes a battery that promises 8 hours and 15 minutes on a single charge, while the Stream 13 has a battery that lasts 7 hours and 45 minutes. The Stream 13 also has optional 4G connectivity with 200 MB of free data each month.
The HP Stream 11 starts at $199.99, while the HP Stream 13 starts at $229.99.
Next up we have the two tablets, the HP Stream 7 and the HP Stream 8. Again, HP didn't provide any hardware details. However, both of these devices run Windows 8.1 and come with a quad-core Intel chip, Office 365 Personal, 60 minutes of Skype per month and 1 TB of Microsoft OneDrive storage for a year. The HP Stream 8 also comes with a 4G option, providing 200 MB of free data per month for life.
Like Microsoft, HP is shooting to provide services first and hardware second. For these tablets, as well as the two notebooks, HP includes its suite of HP Connected apps. These include HP Connected Music for listening to tunes from multiple sources, HP Connected Photo for storing photos in one place and HP Connected Drive to access files from multiple devices.
The HP Stream 7 tablet starts at $99, and the HP Stream 8 tablet starts at $149.99.
Obviously, the big news here is that HP is offering these four devices at super low prices. Presumably, HP is using Windows 8.1 with Bing to keep the overall cost down. If you notice, all four also use Intel chips, meaning customers are getting the x86 version of Microsoft's platform rather than Windows RT, which runs on ARM-based chips such as the Tegra and Snapdragon processors.
We expect to see additional information about these four devices as we get closer to November, so stay tuned.
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