HP's ultra-cheap Stream laptops are part of Microsoft's push to find an answer to Google's Chromebooks, which are gradually creeping their way up the laptop market share rankings month by month. The appeal of Google's devices isn't only their cheap hardware, but also their great-value cloud storage and web-based document editing via Google Docs and Sheets.
The one downside of this cloud-based lifestyle is that you won't be able to run any local applications that would have run on Windows. These budget Windows 8.1 laptops could prove to be the answer to this, coming with a lot of useful extras that make them even better value than they first appear.
Buying a Stream immediately nets you a one-year Office365 Personal subscription (worth £60 from Microsoft), which includes 1TB of OneDrive storage, the full Microsoft Office suite, which you can install on one PC, one tablet and one smartphone. It also gives you access to the web-based Office Online, which we actually prefer to Google Docs. Of course, if you want to continue using it after a year, you'll have to pay or lose the Office software licences
We got hands-on with both the HP Stream 11 and 14 at an event in London this week, getting our first chance to get a feel for these new devices.
STREAM 11 (11-d007na) - £179
The 11in Stream 11 should be available in various colours, although at the time of writing only blue models are on sale in the UK. The machine feels nicely built with a slightly grippy finish on the lid and a dotted pattern on the wrist rest. We were particularly impressed by the keyboard on the Stream 11, with its white, chiclet-style keys yielding a surprising amount of travel making it very comfortable to type on.
Without its charger the Stream 11 weighs just 1.28kg which puts it among the lightest laptops we've ever tested. With its reasonably rugged feeling design we'd be happy slinging into a bag without too much thought.
A dual-core 2.16GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor powers the Stream 11 and is coupled to 2GB of RAM. That's not an awful lot of memory so we'd be wary about having a lot of tabs open when browsing the web, and we'd suggest not having too many programs at once. The processor should be able to power you through most basic tasks without too much fuss.
The 11in screen is a 1,366x768 pixel panel. It's not Full HD and you won't be able to comfortably fit two windows side-by-side, but it's at least bright and reasonably colourful.
You get a microSD card reader, 3.5mm headset jack, HDMI output and two USB3 ports on the sides of the device. A 32GB eMMC SSD keeps storage costs down, but does mean you end up with just 17.4GB free for local files. You won't be able to store huge files here but, much like a Chromebook, you'll need to adopt a cloud-first lifestyle, storing your documents in OneDrive instead of your hard disk.
Based on our first impressions of the Stream 11, we'd say it has a very good chance of being a success - the £60 Office365 deal alone makes it brilliant value, although we'll have to save our final verdict for our full, in-depth review.
STREAM 14 (14-z050sa) - £229
The Stream 14 we tested was an all-silver design, but there are other models with coloured highlights. Despite being made out of plastic, the Stream 14 has the look of a more expensive Envy device thanks to its matt black keys, smooth edges and Beats-branded speakers.
Like the Stream 11, the Stream 14's keys have plenty of travel and are comfortable to use. The extra space yielded by the 14in chassis means there's more room for your hands and means the keys are bigger and more pleasingly spaced out. We were also pleased with the all-in-one touchpad, with taps, physical clicks and multi-fingered gestures all working consistently well.
Three USB ports, a microSD card slot and a headset jack are found around the sides of the chassis. It weighs 1.74kg which is still pretty portable and we'd have no issues carrying it around in a bag all day.
The screen is still a 1,366x768 panel which is to be expected on a laptop costing this little. The processor is a step up, though, with a quad-core, 1GHz AMD A4 Micro-6400T powering the device. We've not tested a laptop using this chip before and we're intrigued to see how much performance AMD has squeezed out of such a cheap processor. In our brief time with the Stream 14 we had no performance issues and opening programs felt reasonably snappy, although we'll wait for our full review before giving you the final performance verdict.
The HP Stream 14 looks to be a great value Chromebook rival, perfectly sized for those of us with bigger hands. It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft can coax potential Chromebook buyers back to its Office365 and OneDrive products, but these laptops stand a very good chance of being able to do so.