The legit $200 laptop!

Just in case you wonder, the strategy is to get you away from Chromebooks engineered by Google and manufactured by the likes of Acer. The name of the disruptive laptop device is HP Stream 11 (Stream). It runs Windows 8.1 and costs a meager $200, inclusive of a free year of MS Office 365 and […]

Just in case you wonder, the strategy is to get you away from Chromebooks engineered by Google and manufactured by the likes of Acer. The name of the disruptive laptop device is HP Stream 11 (Stream). It runs Windows 8.1 and costs a meager $200, inclusive of a free year of MS Office 365 and 1 terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. The latter is valued at $70. Additional perks include a $25 gift certificate toward a purchase from MS Windows Store – although critiques quip that nothing in MS Store costs $25! At any rate, when it’s all said and done, you’ll just be paying $105 for a real-life, full-size, laptop.
Microsoft doesn’t like the attention that Chromebooks are getting and is out to disrupt it. Chromebooks are hardware devices that are driven by Google’s Chrome operating (OS); they are light, inexpensive “laptops” specifically built for online computing. That is, these computers were intended solely as a convenient way for you to access the Internet, so that you can work with your data (movies, videos, pictures, etc.) that are stored on the cloud – Google Drive in this case. Chromebooks are not suitable for intensive use, such as powerful computations or gaming. In the baseline Chromebooks, if you are offline, the computer is virtually useless! However, newer, improved versions are trying to add more offline capabilities so you wouldn’t feel like tossing the books out of the window when you lose Internet connection.
Do not confuse Chrome OS with Chrome browser, both of which were developed by Google. Unlike Chrome OS, which is the engine for the Chromebooks mini laptops, Chrome browser is an interface that allows you to connect to, and interact with, the web. It is Google’s answer to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox, for example. Note that the Chrome browser is routinely installed in MS Windows and Apple desktops and laptops.
Because Chromebooks were originally designed to get you to the cloud where you could have all the storage space that you need, these devices do not carry any decent amount of storage – 16 GB (standard) of internal storage, which is tiny by today’s standards. The random-access memory (RAM) in Chromebooks is a meager 2 GB. The processors in Chromebooks have been described by Walter Mossberg of Wall Street Journal as “a wimpy processor, one of Intel’s entry-level Celeron models.”
Despite these shortcomings, Chromebooks are getting popular, and Microsoft, in its newly-found competitive blood, is going after the device; first, by underselling Chromebooks on price – Stream’s effective price of $105 versus the $250-$350 that typical Chromebooks sell for, and then on capabilities. It should be pretty easy to beat Chromebooks on capabilities, since they do not have much, by design.
So, what do you get with Stream other than Microsoft’s productivity tools? That is, in terms of tech specs. While Acer Chromebooks come with 16 GB of local storage, Stream comes with 32 GB of flash storage, 11 GB of which are taken up by the Windows 8.1 OS. For Chromebooks, you get 100 GB of Google Drive cloud storage, while Microsoft gives you 1 terabyte of cloud storage free for one year, after which you pay $70 annually. In her 2 December 2014 review of Stream, Joanna Stern of Wall Street Journal suggests that Stream’s build is superior to Acer Chromebook’s. The former “feels far more like a laptop that costs two or three times the price. Unlike the old netbooks or today’s tablet keyboards, you don’t have to squeeze your fingers together like a hand puppet to type on the comfortable, spacious keyboard. Better yet, it doesn’t cave in to my forceful keystrokes. (The Acer’s keyboard feels much flimsier.)” However, Stern notes that, compared to Acer and other below-$300 Chromebooks, “Stream’s matte 1366 x 768-pixel screen is noticeably dimmer and washed out. I kept hitting the screen brightness button on it, only to find it was at the max.” She however mentions that she was able to work on Stream for seven hours straight, an event she considered to be impressive for a Windows machine. “In a more punishing test, streaming video at full brightness, the Stream lasted six hours and 34 minutes. In that same test, the Acer’s battery lasted 45 minutes longer.”
The Stream also has a big advantage in terms of the OS: Windows 8.1versus Chrome. The former is a significantly more advanced OS. You get the full power of Windows, its advanced file system and a bigger selection of apps. Also, in Stern’s words: “plus, you can use much of it whether you have an Internet connection or not. You don’t have to think twice about doing things a Chromebook can’t, like Skype with friends or easily print stuff.” All these are in addition to the access to Microsoft’s productivity tools.
You may wonder why HP/Microsoft is able to sell Stream for so low. Stream runs a version of (the full) Windows that Microsoft charges less for. Reviewers have reported that Stream is slow compared to Chromebooks – which is not surprising since the latter is basically a shell, with little inside it to consume resources. Junkware apps pre-loaded by HP into Stream also contribute to the slowness in booting.
A statement by Stern qualifies for the takeaway from this article: “…if you want a $200 computer solely to surf the Web, the Acer is a better performer. But if you want a cheap computer that does much more than that-albeit at a slower pace-take a look at the Stream.” With spotty Wi-Fi availability in a country like Nigeria, the choice is pretty clear.