HP Slatebook 10 X2 review

The HP Slatebook 10 x2 is a sub-£400 tablet with a keyboard dock, which immediately puts in contest with the Asus Transformer range. Given Asus’s head start, HP needs to pack in some pretty impressive hardware, and at first glance it appears to have delivered.

The 10.1in Slatebook 10 x2 is powered by Nvidia’s incredibly powerful Tegra 4, a quad-core processor paired with a fifth power-saving core intended to reduce battery drain when the tablet isn’t in use. The chip’s more than capable of running Android smoothly. In fact, it’s among the fastest Android devices we’ve tested, completing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in just 699.1ms. Interestingly, the Slatebook 10 x2 does fall slightly short of other Tegra 4 tablets.

The fifth power-saving core kicked in during our video rundown test, but it couldn’t help the Slatebook x2 achieve more than eight hours and six minutes on a single charge. That was without using the extra battery built into the keyboard dock. With the dock attached the Slatebook managed 11 hours 54 minutes hours, which is a much better performance. However, the Tegra 4-based Asus Transformer Pad TF701T lasted 15 hours and 17 minutes with its keyboard dock attached.

As for graphics processing, the Slatebook 10 x2 scored 13,220 in 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, which puts it behind other Tegra 4-based tablets such as the Advent Vega Note, but that score still beats the vast majority of devices. Real Racing 3, one of our most demanding Android games, showed no sign of frame rate drops or stuttering. This means you should have no trouble playing games with the Slatebook 10 x2.

The Slatebook’s 1,920×1,200-resolution screen uses a 10.1in IPS panel that produces reasonable viewing angles, but almost everything else about the display is disappointing. The glossy finish makes it almost impossible to see what’s on screen in direct sunlight, especially as the backlight produces a disappointingly low peak brightness of 225.7cd/m2. This is far below what we’d deem suitable for outdoor use. It’s a shame, as in darker environments colours look rather vibrant and contrast is decent enough. Images and text look sharp in isolation, but the 2560×1,440 resolutions of competing tablets put it to shame.