Review: HP ElitePad 1000 G2

When you talk about business grade tablets, there aren’t a lot of choices, but HP’s ElitePad 1000 G2 looks to provide a dose of shiny silver aluminium professionalism to those who aren’t at all into Lenovo’s black ThinkPad style.

Features

Made for business, HP’s ElitePad 1000 G2 brings with a style that will seem familiar to anyone who has ever played with a tablet, and yet some insides that will draw the professional folk closer.

First there’s a 10.1 inch display running the Full HD compatible resolution of 1920×1200, sitting behind Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 and supporting an optional wireless digitiser pen.

Underneath this screen, you’ll find a quad-core Intel Atom Z3795 clocked at 1.6GHz, paired with 4GB RAM and either 64 or 128GB of storage depending on the model you end up getting (our review model was a 64GB version). Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 runs here out of the box.

A microSD slot is included in the tablet, able to expand on the storage provided using this slot.

Wireless options are catered for with 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi as well as Bluetooth, and there’s even an option for mobile data in the HP ElitePad with a 4G LTE modem included also supporting GPS.

Cameras are taken care of by way of an 8 megapixel rear camera with a flash, and a 2.1 megapixel 1080p equivalent camera on the front without a flash.

Tablets tend not to have many buttons and few ports, and the HP ElitePad 1000 G2 is exactly what we expect, with two buttons up on the top edge for power and rotation lock switch (not technically a button), a button on the back for the volume rocker, and a Windows button along the bottom edge of the display to bring you back to the Start screen, while the ports include a 3.5mm headset jack up top, a proprietary charge and dock connector along the bottom edge, and a slot at the back for microSD and the microSIM.

Performance

Let’s talk positives first, because the ElitePad 1000 G2 isn’t bad at all if you’re after a mobile computer with good looks, a great screen, and a decent amount of performance.

First is the aesthetics, and it’s hard not to see HP’s G2 as being modelled off the original Apple iPad because really, that’s what this tablet looks like, although it has taken some changes to the body.

The ElitePad is obviously a little thinner and shaped more for modern design, so it tapers off towards the edges more than Apple’s first-generation tablet, but the thin aluminium design with similar obvious edges are there, and while it’s a design Apple has since retired, HP’s incarnation looks good, and it’s comfy to hold too, thanks to that solid aluminium casing.

It’s almost all metal too, by the way, except for the top where some of the casing is plastic, likely for the antennas for WiFi and 4G, since both are included in this tablet.

Over to the screen, and since we’ve already complained once this week about a sub-par tablet screen, it’s lovely to see a company paying attention and using an excellent panel in the same size.

Here in this tablet, HP has provided a Full HD 1920×1200 display, providing close to Retina pixel count at 224 pixels per inch on the 10.1 inch screen, with excellent viewing angles providing a lot of colour from most viewpoints.

This is the sort of screen tablets should be coming with at a minimum, and HP has even made it support touch technology, with an optional accessory coming in the form of a stylus, which is positive for those people who need it.

Performance also feels positive here, with the 4GB RAM and Intel Atom Z3795 providing enough speed to let you get some work done and plenty of web surfing.

For the most part, we had no problems jumping between apps and using it for browsing the internet. Office and productivity apps should be fine here, too, though the screen isn’t quite fast enough for typing on, an issue we’ll get to shortly.

Fortunately, the battery is solid, and while six to seven hours of consistent use are possible, you might even find it’s better as one of those “use occasionally” gadgets, providing several days of use if you’re only using it every so often, which we found in our test.

But if you like ports for using a tablet like a laptop, you are, sadly, out of luck.