Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Cheap phones and computers aren’t as capable or as exciting as high-end phones and computers. We tend to focus on the expensive ones here because they’re where new tech usually shows up first, but plenty of people are buying based mostly or entirely on price and not on features.

For people who don’t have $400 or $500 to drop on a laptop—more or less the minimum amount we’d recommend for anyone looking for a primary machine—there are computers like HP’s Stream 11. We came away pretty impressed by this $200 11.6-inch laptop when we reviewed it last year, and now HP is back with a follow-up that tries to retain what made the first one good while addressing a few of its flaws. More impressively, the company does this without driving the price up.

This is still a niche laptop. $200 just isn’t going to buy you a powerhouse. But it’s a solid upgrade to the first model, and it’s a worthy Windows-based competitor to most budget Chromebooks out there if you’re just looking to do some basic computing.

What’s the same?

Specs at a glance: HP Stream 11 (late 2015) SCREEN 1366×768 at 11.6" (135 ppi) OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit CPU 1.6GHz (2.16Ghz Turbo) dual-core Intel Celeron N3050 RAM 2GB 1600MHz DDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics HDD 32GB eMMC NETWORKING 433Mbps 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0 PORTS 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI, microSD card reader, headphone jack SIZE 11.81 x 8.1 x 0.78" (300mm x 205.7mm x 19.3mm) WEIGHT 2.6 lbs (1.18kg) BATTERY 2-cell 37.69Wh Li-polymer WARRANTY 1 year STARTING PRICE $199.99 OTHER PERKS 720p Webcam, Kensington lock slot, free year of Office 365 and 1TB of OneDrive storage

The new Stream 11 looks and feels a whole lot like the old one, which is mostly a good thing. The keyboard and general build quality still punch way above the $200 price point—it’s all plastic, and it’s a bit on the chunky side, but it feels like it could take some punishment, and the bright colors and the patterns used on the palmrest give it personality that many budget laptops lack. The key spacing is comfortable, and travel is surprisingly good. It’s too much to ask to get a backlit keyboard at this price, but it’s really the only thing that’s missing.

And while the ports have moved around a little (they’ve moved toward the front edge of the laptop instead of the rear edge, and they’re spread out more evenly across both sides), you’re still getting the same basic stuff. There’s one USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, a USB 3.0 port, a full-size HDMI port, and a microSD card slot rather than a full-size SD card slot. Moving the ports to the front of the laptop makes sense for most of them since they become more easily accessible, but it does seem like it would be a bit awkward to have to connect an external monitor or TV to the front of the device rather than the back.

There are three major weak points, all of which limit the laptop’s potential even though they’re forgivable for the price. The first is the screen, which is a 1366×768 TN panel. That resolution and density level is acceptable in an 11-inch screen, but the faded colors, relatively low contrast and brightness, and poor viewing angles are harder to live with.

The second downside is living with just 32GB of internal storage space, which is enough for Windows and a handful of apps and files and that’s about it. Using the microSD card slot to add more storage can be useful, though external cards are typically slower and less flexible than internal drives (it makes me uncomfortable to install apps on drives that can be removed, for example). The storage also uses a relatively slow eMMC interface, which contributes occasionally to slow or inconsistent performance, especially if you’re trying to do a couple of different disk-intensive things at once. Installing large Windows updates like the 1511 update takes substantially longer than it does on a standard SATA or PCIe SSD.





And finally, shipping with just 2GB of RAM limits what these ultra-cheap computers are capable of. General performance isn’t bad, but modern Web browsers loading modern Web pages is surprisingly memory-intensive, and if you’ve got half a dozen tabs and a couple of apps open you’re probably already pushing the laptop’s limits.

None of this is really intended as a knock against HP, which is making the same cuts that many PC OEMs make when driving a laptop’s price down. There are still lots of good points here, and HP gets the keyboard and a few other crucial things right, which isn’t always the case in laptops that cost three or four times as much. But the small SSD and low RAM, combined with the fact that you can't really open this thing up and upgrade it to address those flaws yourself, limits the potential audience here.

What’s better?

HP has significantly improved the Wi-Fi in the Stream this year, moving from a basic 2.4GHz 802.11n adapter to an 802.11ac adapter from Intel that can connect at theoretical speeds up to 433Mbps. As far as 802.11ac goes, it’s still fairly basic, but barebones 802.11ac is still much better than basic 802.11n, if only because it can connect to networks on the less-congested 5GHz band.

GPU performance also gets a nice boost, which is appreciated—these things make good kid laptops, and the ability to play games like Minecraft and other light and/or educational fare is a selling point. The Stream uses a Celeron N3050 based on the Braswell architecture, and Intel’s prioritization of GPU performance means that it can double the GPU performance of the last Stream depending on the benchmark. (Usually. You will run into games where the weak CPU becomes the bottleneck, though, something we’ll examine in more detail later.)











The GPU improves graphics API support, too, though that’s not tremendously important in such a low-end system. DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.3, and OpenCL 2.0 are all available.

The trackpad is another area of improvement. The last one could be flaky at finger tracking and clicking, and as of this writing HP’s drivers don’t provide support for Windows 10’s improved trackpad gestures. The new one supports those gestures and is actually pretty good at them, and both finger tracking and clicking seem more reliable. For the price, it’s as good as you’re likely to find.

And though it's still a weak point overall, the screen is a little brighter—it maxed out at about 150 nits in the old Stream but gets all the way up to 200 nits in the new model. HP may not use the same components in every Stream it sells since manufacturers often source components from multiple places, and there’s some small variation even among PCs with identical components. But hopefully this means that HP is using slightly brighter, higher-quality panels in all its Stream laptops now.

Finally, despite that brighter screen, the new Stream delivered significantly better battery life than the first one. HP promises about ten hours of runtime, and in our light Wi-Fi browsing test the new Stream delivered just over eleven hours. It also performed admirably in our WebGL test, which keeps a light but continuous load on the CPU and GPU. Whatever you're doing with this thing, the battery should hold up.





Listing image by Andrew Cunningham