There aren’t many good laptops which can be bought for just $200, but the HP Stream 11 is one such laptop, which is affordable yet packs some punch features as well. Not only does the laptop boast a far better battery life, but also serves as your best buddy when it comes to listening to music on YouTube courtesy its sound.
To compensate for the low price, the display is just average, and the heat ventilation system doesn’t really cool off the laptop in time. Still, being a very portable machine, the HP Stream 11 is worth the buck and might be a great choice especially for your kid’s very first machine.
Design
It totally depends on the kind of person you are: You might love its design or hate it altogether. This is because the laptop on first look indeed looks like a child’s toy, available in purple or vibrant aqua color. Except for the keyboard, everything is covered in either of these two colors. Indeed, your child will end up liking the design and showing around to his friends, but certainly, it’s a no-go for a professional meeting.
Having a plastic body makes for a more portable laptop, and certainly, you weren’t expecting an aluminum-chassis for a $200 laptop, were you? On the other hand, it does mean that the laptop is firm and that there is minimal-flexing. The laptop weighs just 2.5 pounds and measures 11.8 x 8.1 x 0.7 inches.
Ports
There is a laptop lock to keep your laptop safe and secure from theft. Furthermore, there is a USB 2.0 port too on the left side along with a combination of audio and mic jack. While on the right side of the laptop, there is the usual charging port and a special LED indicator which tells the amount of battery remaining. There is a dedicated microSD card slot too, and a USB 3.0 port, and on top of that, a full-sized HDMI port too. What else do you want to cram into this 11-inch beauty?
Display
As we said earlier, HP tried to cut some costs through the laptop’s display. The laptop although has a 720p screen resolution but the colors aren’t really vibrant, nor are they accurate. The laptop has a score of 3.69 on the Delta-E rating, where lower scores are better. On the other hand, the brightness level isn’t that bad, as the screen recorded 188 nits on the light meter which is good enough, considering other laptops in the range.
The Stream 11’s panel reproduced nearly 77.5 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is better than what Samsung Chromebook 3 managed with 63.1 percent. The Side-to-Side angles are one thing to look for though Vertical angles are just on par.
Audio
Perhaps, one of the strong points about the laptop is it Audio, which isn’t even found on some expensive notebooks. The laptop features dual speakers, and the sound coming out of them is rather dynamic. The laptop packs a DTS Sound Dashboard too, through which you can customize audio the way you deem fit.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard has a travel of just 1.2 milli-meters, but it makes up for that by its relatively high actuation force of 69 grams. This still doesn’t provide the kind of typing experience one would want, but for kids who aren’t really professional typists, it seems suitable.
As for the touchpad, measuring 3.6 x 2.1-inches, it isn’t really spacious enough, but it does its job well by being responsive. There aren’t any dedicated discrete mouse buttons though, so you would have to adapt to using the touchpad’s sensitiveness.
Battery
The major selling-point about the laptop is its great battery life. It lasts a long 8 hours and 23 minutes on continuous use over Wi-Fi.
Heat
According to HP, all of its Stream laptops don’t require a fan, but it would have been better if they had one. This is because the laptop tends to get hot with just 30 minutes of usage.
Webcam
This might come as a surprise, but the laptop does feature an impressive web-cam, with sharper images.
Price and Only Configuration
The laptop has only one model which is available for a very low price tag of $200. For this much amount, you are getting a 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron N3060 processor, Intel Graphics 400, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMc flash storage. This means that the Stream 11 is able to handle basic computing tasks with quite an ease.
Perhaps, this laptop might not be ideal for adults but is the best when it comes to a kid’s laptop since it is affordable yet offers everything a kid might want.
