The HP Mesquite tablet is a 7 inch Android tablet with an Intel Atom processor and a low price tag. It launched as a Black Friday exclusive, with Walmart selling the tablet for $89.
But now that Black Friday has come and gone, you can still pick up this tablet for less than the price of a Kindle Paperwhite. Walmart is now selling HP’s cheapest Android tablet for $99.
If you’re willing to spend a bit more money you can certainly find a tablet with a better screen, faster processor, and other premium features. But this isn’t a premium tablet — it’s a $99 model which looks surprisingly decent when you consider the price.
The tablet features a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Z2640 Medfield processor, a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. It has a 0.3MP front-facing camera, and features WiFi and Bluetooth.
The HP tablet measures 7.6″ x 4.9″ x 0.4″ and weighs about 13 ounces. It runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software. It’s said to get up to 5 hours of battery life.
While you’d probably get more bang for your buck with a refurbished Google Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy Tab, or Amazon Kindle Fire, the HP Mesquite tablet is one of the first Intel-powered tablets to sell for under $100. It also has at least one thing that Google’s Nexus tablets lack: a microSD card slot for extra storage space.
If HP wants to sell something like this they should do it under another name. HP is a brand I avoid but many still think they make quality gear. Cheap stuff like this will not help their reputation.
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On another note, I am waiting for one of these cheap tablets to incorporate an IR blaster and some kind of learning/programmable remote software. We don’t need great specs to make one of these a universal remote.
This tablet running Android or bloodsucker winblows 8 ?
“Intel’s Atom Z2640 uses an integrated SGX540 GPU”
A shame there’s no cheap hardware with FOSS GPU/VPU Linux driver 🙁
Nothing to see here, move along.
Note that HP sells an ARM based tablet that is lighter and gets 50% longer battery life while boasting all around better (screen, a rear camera, etc.) specs. They aren’t dumping it as a loss leader though so it retails for a little more. Intel still has some catching up to do. At least they are in the right ballpark now.
The big question is, Does this thing have a BIOS/EFI and can you install a different OS?
Any idea how I would go looking for the Bios (from inside Android)?
It is not bad for the price. I had the Palm Tablet and it did not have a micro-sd car slot. I think this would make for a great first tablet.
I have one. It’s not much of a tablet.
Were you expecting a lot for that price? It seems good for the price it is being sold at. Probably worlds apart from many off-brand tablet computers.
It’s not significantly better than the competition, no. But it’s not bad for the price
How does it compare to the Hisense Sero Pro? Looks pretty similar.