HP Stream 11 Low-Cost Laptop

HP Stream 11 Low-Cost Laptop

HP has come up with a device that gives us another option - the new Stream 11-d023tu. It's part of a series of devices that emphasise portability and connectivity, and so it breaks from the usual common standards that we take for granted when it comes to laptop specifications. The Stream lineup also includes a laptop with a 13-inch screen and a tablet with an 8-inch screen, but what we have today is the smaller clamshell model, the Stream 11.

Look and feel

There's no getting around it: The HP Stream 11 is an eye-catching device, and not everyone will think this is a good thing, or that it's been done for the right reasons. HP has experimented with colourful pastels before, but the Stream 11 takes unusual design to a whole new level. The entire exterior is a bright blue, except for a mirror-finished HP logo in the centre of the lid. The texture feels good, but it in our time with the device it picked up smudges, sweat and oil from our fingers very easily, and even got scuffed when being put into or pulled out of bags.

Specifications

The HP Stream 11 is powered by a lowly Intel Celeron N2840 CPU, which is a dual-core model and runs at 2.16GHz. This particular processor is based on the Bay Trail architecture which is usually associated with low-powered Atom processors, not the Haswell architecture which powers most of Intel's desktop and laptop CPUs. There's 2GB of RAM, which is the minimum acceptable amount these days.

HP has cut a corner in terms of the amount of storage available. The Stream 11 has only 32GB of solid-state memory which is again more common of tablets than laptops. This is disappointing, and HP tries to explain it away by pointing out the ubiquity of cloud storage services today, and the fact that 32GB of flash is a lot faster than a spinning hard drive.

Strangely, the SD card slot can only handle cards of up to 32GB, which is just ridiculous to us. SDXC capacity support would not have cost that much extra, and even tablets today allow for more expansion. With Internet access still too slow and expensive for anyone to rely on cloud services, buyers who need to store more than just a few documents will have to get used to carrying a portable hard drive around.

The screen resolution is of course 1366x768, though that isn't too bad for an 11.6-inch screen. However the screen itself is not of very high quality. Viewing angles are not good, colours are dull, and it isn't visible enough under indoor office lighting unless you pump the brightness nearly all the way up.

Performance

We calibrated our expectations of the Stream 11 based on its low-grade Celeron, and our instincts turned out to be accurate. Performance was barely better than what we'd expect from a netbook or tablet. The Stream 11 booted very quickly thanks to the flash storage, but there were definitely times when the device lagged without even very much load. Menus took a second to pop up, programs didn't load very snappily, and the Windows 8 spinning-ring cursor made frequent appearances. That said, all other devices at this price level, regardless of size or shape, perform roughly the same.

The benchmarks didn't surprise us much, except that both 3DMark and PCMark were unable to run to completion. Only PCMark's Home scenario finished and gave us a score of 1777 points, which was on par with entry-level laptops and tablets. POVray finished running in 30 minutes, 13 seconds while Cinebench gave us a CPU score of 70 (multi-threaded) - both scores well below those of the HP Pavilion 13-b102TU we reviewed a little while ago, illustrating the sort of tasks that are really crippled by the low-end processor.