Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/26/review_hp_slate_21_tablet/

HP’s ENORMO-SLAB: The Slate 21 MONSTER tablet

The 21-inch, 1080p Android tablet that thinks it’s an all-in-one desktop PC

By Alun Taylor

Posted in Personal Tech, 26th November 2013 15:23 GMT

Review Hewlett-Packard’s first attempt at an Android tablet, the Slate 7, was a cheap, wretched and irredeemably awful device. So when I heard that the Palm killer’s follow-up fondleslab was to be a 21-inch affair, my reaction was one of incredulity mixed with foreboding.

HP Slate 21

Your new desktop? HP’s Android-based Slate 21

In short, I expected a bad idea poorly executed. I’m happy to report I was wrong on both counts. The HP Slate 21 is a rather good notion realised equally well.

With a 21-inch screen, the new Slate was never going to be small or light. It weighs 4.9kg and measures up at 531 x 354 x 67mm – about the same size and weight as a budget 21-inch telly. Of course HP isn’t suggesting that you carry the Slate 21 around with you. The idea is that you use it at home as a contraption that is part family tablet, part media centre and part occasional-use computer.

Made from gloss white plastic, the Slate 21 is a decently smart and solid affair which should look right at home in any lounge, bedroom or kitchen. In fact it looks much like a Windows all-in-one PC. It’s nowhere near as sleek and sexy as a 21.5-inch iMac, but one of those will set you back more than three times as much - £1,149 ($1,299 Stateside) versus £349 ($399 in the US).

HP Slate 21

The stand is rigged to support any angle between 15 and 70 degrees

To keep things from looking too fussy, controls have been kept to the minimum with the brightness, volume and power buttons all tucked away on the lower right side.

A stand at the back props this large bit of weirdness up. Rather than having a selection of fixed positions, it’s heavily spring-loaded so it can support any angle from 15 to 70 degrees. To adjust it you simply push the top of the unit back or lift it forward, and the stand adjusts automatically to maintain the angle. Simple but effective. Just make sure you don’t push it back until the stand slips off the edge of the table.

Unscrew the hinge and there is a standard VESA mount behind for fixing the Slate to a wall.

HP Slate 21

Please be upstanding...

With three USB 2.0 ports and an 10/100Mbps Ethernet socket, the Slate 21 is reasonably well connected. On the wireless side you get Bluetooth 3.0 and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi. There’s only 8GB of internal storage, just under 5GB of which is free after system demands, but an SD card slot and those three USB ports makes that less of an issue.

The memory card slot, along with the 3.5mm audio jack and one of the USB ports, are easily accessible on the left of the machine. The other two USBs, the Ethernet port and power jack are tucked away at the back. I suspect the idea is that you keep more permanently attached peripherals plugged into the connectors at the back and use the side ones for the things more often unplugged but life would be easier if all the connectors were on the left side. There seems to be ample room

The screen is the Slate 21’s strong-point. A 21.5-inch, 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD affair, it’s bright enough for indoor use. It’s sharp, colourful and good to look at from almost any viewing angle. The last fact is rather important because HP sees the Slate 21 as a device the family will huddle around. Narrow viewing angles would have put the kibosh on that.

HP Slate 21

...or just laid back

The touchscreen is an optical affair. Three cameras keep track of where and how you tap, stroke or fondle it. It works just as well as a capacitive display as per an iPad or Nexus 7, at least until you notice that it can only recognise two points of contact at any given time. That may limit some people’s usage but didn’t pose a problem for me.

Telly vision

A more useful side effect of this set-up is that you can use the touchscreen with the blunt end of a wooden spoon should you be scrolling through a recipe while cooking with hands covered in flour.

HP Slate 21

Some of the ports are hidden round the back, all-in-one style

The only small visual criticism I can make of the display is that is rather reflective, something you notice if using it in a brightly lit room. The optical tracking system necessitates a gap of around 5mm between the screen and the plastic bezel, and this feels a bit odd when you make an edge-inward swipe, a gesture Android increasingly depends upon.

Below the screen sit a pair of DTS+ enhanced speakers which produce an impressive sound with plenty of volume and depth. Make no mistake, the combination of a fine screen and a good pair of speakers make the Slate 21 a very useful media centre whether you are accessing local media or streaming content from the likes of Netflix or BBC iPlayer.

HP has fitted the Slate 21 with its own media centre app for playing music and video, and viewing picture files. It’s a decent app and, perhaps more importantly, one of the few extras that HP has added to Android 4.2.2, here presented in largely stock form.

HP Slate 21

Other ports are on the left - and set in very glossy plastic

Yes, the Slate 21 also comes with a couple of third-party apps, including Evernote and Kingsoft Office, but these can easily be removed as you would any other downloaded app. If you want to access your Windows desktop, the Splashtop 2 app is also pre-loaded and there’s a handy 25GB of free Box storage for purchasers.

Above the screen sits a webcam capable of recording video at 720p, and a microphone for Skyping, Google Hangout-ing or however else you get your video call jollies. There is simple camera app if you are into making video selfies.

Thanks to a quad-core 1.66GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 chipset with 1GB of RAM, the Slate 21 is a powerful machine. It returned an AnTuTu benchmark score of well over 30,000. That number does flatter to device just a little though because while the user interface runs with an acceptable level of fluidity - think Nexus 7 2012 rather than the new super-slick 2013 version - there is the occasional hesitation while it rebuilds desktop widgets when transferring back to the home screen.

HP Slate 21 AnTuTu results

AnTuTu benchmark results

Thanks to those USB ports you can easily connect the Slate 21 to mice, keyboards and hard drives, and so press the Slate 21 for the jobs normally reserved for a Windows PC. I wrote this review on the Slate 21 using OfficeSuite Pro and the Microsoft trackball and Logitech keyboard usually connected to my laptop. They worked just fine.

Matters become a little less straightforward when it comes to printing. HP’s Printer Control app only seems to work with HP wireless printers, certainly it was no help when I tried to connect my Canon MP250 via USB, so I resorted to Google’s Cloud Print service.

Just about now someone is going to say something about Android lacking tablet optimised apps. Big deal. The majority of apps I tried on the Slate 21 looked the same, and worked just as well, as they do on the likes of the Xperia Z Tablet or the Nexus 10.

HP Slate 21 home screen

The 21-inch, 1080p screen gives plenty of room for desktop icons and widgets

I say "majority" because the Flickr app shows up in the Play Store as unsuitable as did a few banking apps and, oddly, Google’s Keep app - though you can access Keep through the Drive app. The Android keyboard looks a trifle odd when pasted across a large screen, but SwiftKey offers all the options if you want either a smaller or split keyboard.

Tablet looks, desktop experience

Taken in the round, the Slate 21 user experience really doesn’t look or feel like a PC running a tablet OS.

HP Slate 21

The speaker is surprisingly good, for a tablet

I’ve read some criticism in the US press - hacks across the pond got their grubby mitts on the Slate 21 well ahead of us scribblers in Blighty - of the Slate 21 for lacking an accelerometer or a GPS chip but frankly that’s daft. The 21 is so clearly not intended to be portable or held in your hands that stripping it of two bits of functionality that are wholly aimed at handheld devices seems a reasonable course for HP to have taken to keep the price down.

You can’t use the Slate 21 away from the mains because there is no battery. Some may quibble about that, and I must say that a small internal battery able to support 20 or 30 minutes of runtime when you are moving the thing between power sockets would be handy. On the other hand it boots up in less than ten seconds so that really isn’t a massive hardship and certainly not a deal breaker.

HP Slate 21

SwiftKey has more adaptability for a big screen

The 21’s Achilles Heel, such as it is, is gaming. If you move beyond the likes of Angry Birds, it’s not much cop. The size, weight and lack of an accelerometer means that trying to use it as a conventional tablet is out of the question, and even games which have a gamepad setup option, such as Dead Trigger 2, wouldn’t work with my generic USB game controller. To be quite honest I didn’t expect it to and you may get better mileage by using something like GameStop’s Tablet Wireless Game Controller for Android.

Using the touchscreen it was just possible to play games like N.O.V.A. 3 which have no gamepad support but it was not ideal. That’s a shame because it looked absolutely superb and ran very smoothly, proving the 21 has the chops to run graphically intense games.

One final comment needs to be made about the Slate 21 at the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious. How much reward you get from a Slate 21 will depend on how invested you are in Google’s online services. Me? I’m up to my ears in them: Play Music, Play Books, Drive, Picasa – or Google+ Photos as it’s probably better to call it these days – I use them all, daily, so as soon as I signed into my Slate 21 all my stuff was just there.

HP Slate 21

Not too good for gaming?

Naturally that has coloured my opinion of the machine. If I used iOS or Windows Phone on my mobile devices, I’d be less taken by the Slate 21, there’s no point saying otherwise. The less Google there is in your bloodstream, the less appealing the Slate 21 will be, though you could say exactly the same about any tablet.

The Reg Verdict

If you’re after something for domestic web browsing, light computing duties, social networking and media consumption, the HP Slate 21 has plenty to recommend it. It’s powerful, affordable, easy on the eye, comes with all the expected Android/Google goodies and services, and has a great screen and speaker combination.

It may be an answer to a question you’ve not asked, but it’s an impressive answer nonetheless. HP’s PR wallahs are going to have to go some to prise this one away from me. ®