Hands On With the First Tegra 4 Tablet

The first tablet with Nvidia's flagship new Tegra 4 processor comes from an unexpected quarter: HP. Yep, HP's low-end Slate 7 isn't the company's only foray into Android. The HP SlateBook x2 takes solid aim at the high end of the Android tablet market with an excellent keyboard dock and more horsepower than we've seen in any tablet so far. I got some hands-on time with a prototype at a recent HP event in New York.

The SlateBook x2 will only be sold with its keyboard dock; it's being positioned as a convertible, Android-powered tablet-laptop. It's coming out in August for $479.99. The top half is a 10-inch Android 4.2.2 tablet with a 1,920-by-1,080 Full HD IPS LCD screen. It's glad in white or gray plastic, with the power and volume buttons on the back of the panel - an unusual choice, but an HP signature. There's a MicroSD card slot as well as a headphone jack, but I didn't see any slot for a SIM card. The tablet has 2-megapixel cameras on the front and back.

The tablet itself is … a tablet. It had the look and feel of a decently premium device. It has dual front-ported speakers and a little ridge along the bottom. But it seemed thicker and a little clunkier than the sleek, metal Asus Transformer Infinity.

The tablet snaps into the keyboard dock with a satisfying and secure click. The keyboard is unusually good for one of these docks, clearly borrowing from HP's laptop expertise. While it's a 92 percent-sized "netbook" keyboard, the keys have 1.5mm travel, which gives them a top-notch tactile experience. The keyboard also has dedicated home, menu and multitasking buttons as well as some great hardware gestures - a two-fingered swipe can flip between Android home screens, which is really useful.

The keyboard has a secondary battery, full-sized HDMI port, USB port, and SD card slot. You can put two 64GB SD cards into the x2, which comes in 16, 32, and 64GB models. That means you can pack 192GB of storage into this baby. The tablet and keyboard together weigh 2.98 lbs. 

HP's default software build cleaves very close to stock Android, although HP throws in some mostly unremarkable pre-loaded apps into the mix. There's a printing app, a custom media player, and a file manager.

Otherwise, specs were really hard to come by at this demo. I didn't have Internet access, and there was nothing on the tablet that could remotely stress the 1.8-GHz Tegra 4 processor, which has four ARM Cortex-A15 cores and a 72-core GPU. The only thing HP would say about the battery life was that it's "all-day."

Nobody else has yet announced a tablet with this generation of ARM-based processor, which includes the Tegra 4, Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (which has appeared in Galaxy S 4 phones outside the U.S.), Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 800 and rumored chips from LG, Huawei, and others. 

Showing that the gadget was a prototype, neither the touch screen nor the trackpad seemed finished. The touch screen had calibration issues and a strange, matte-looking layer that rendered it dimmer than it should be. The trackpad didn't differentiate its navigation area from its button area, to the extent that when you tried to click a button, the pointer would also wobble.

It's hard to assess a product when it's this early, but HP's big challenge with this tablet is the same that all Android convertible tablets have. It's even starker, though, when it's on a table next to the HP Envy x2, a very similar if slightly larger product running a full version of Windows 8. At $479.99 in the U.S., it's $170 less than the Envy x2 and on par with other high-end Android tablets. Maybe HP will be smarter to compare this to tablets like Samsung's Galaxy Note 2 than to full-fledged Windows laptops running apps like Microsoft Office.