Gadgetory

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are taking a look at the HP elite pad 900 this is HP's business focused Windows 8 Intel Atom powered tablet now of course we've taken a look at a lot of these Intel Atom tablets that all run Windows 8 you know they've got touchscreens they're all fairly similar slates what makes this one different for business users is that it's got some security stuff built in that your IT department will be interested in interestingly it doesn't have a USB port or an easily accessible SD card slot or anything apparently that's a concern for for corporate types sometimes for security you don't want someone to be able to I guess slip an SD card in or USB stick and steal your company data right away you can however get all those connections on various accessories and jackets and dots and stands that you could buy with the elite pad and that's probably the most interesting thing about this system versus other Windows 8 atom tablets that we've seen is that there's a really nice ecosystem of stuff you've got the actual tablet itself I've got a dock right here a nice weighted dock that has some ports and connections in the back including HDMI and VGA and then you can also get this sort of jacket right here and that's got some connections on it also and even a panel where you can put in a sold separately battery and make it kind of a battery pack to give yourself a you know longer time away from the plug and there's also a keyboard case they call this one the productivity jacket and it folds up kind of like an iPad keyboard case does and then you slip the tablet inside and it's actually got a very nice hefty keyboard right here and some ports and connections in the back the one problem I had was when you have the tablet in this productivity jacket too great keyboard experience but there's no little touchpad like on the Microsoft Surface pro the no little pointing stick like lenovo has on one of its tablet keyboard stands so you're basically stuck with using the keyboard and then your finger as a mouse which that doesn't really work that great for basic productivity I actually ended up pairing this with a standalone pad but you could do that with a mouse and that works also but I really would have liked to see that built-in another thing that's a little bit different about this particular tablet is that it has a sixteen by ten aspect ratio screen instead of a sixteen by nine screen which is what you see in most consumer products that gives you a little more vertical space to work with a lot of business laptops are actually still like that and of course the biggest difference is in price this starts off at $6.99 for 32 gig version this is the $7.99 version you do get a mobile broadband antenna for that and then when you add all of these different accessories that cost anywhere from seventy nine to two hundred dollars if you got all this stuff you'd be spending about twelve hundred dollars which is frankly enough to buy a 13-inch MacBook Air or the Microsoft Surface pro which has a Core i5 CPU or a lot of other different types of laptops or tablets that really means that for consumers this kind of guy is only worth getting if you have a company IT department willing to shell out for it for you I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the HP elite pad 900