A low-cost HP laptop was spotted last month and it was believed that this machine would be powered by Google’s Chrome OS given its rumored $200 price tag. That’s certainly not the case. It became clear a couple of weeks after the laptop was spotted that it would be powered by Windows and not Google’s cloud based OS. The company today formally announced the HP Stream laptop, a $300 machine that runs Windows.
Granted that the price tag isn’t as low as was initially expected, but HP never once said that it will make a Windows laptop that costs $200. Nevertheless at this price point the HP Stream lines up nicely against the cheaper Chromebooks that have undoubtedly been eating into the Windows market share at the low-end segment.
HP Stream has a 14-inch 1,366×768 pixel resolution display with 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal memory. It is powered by AMD A4-Micro-6400T Mullins quadcore processor coupled with Radeon R3 graphics. HP says the 32Whr battery should be good for up to 6.5 hours of usage on a single charge.
The laptop also comes with two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, HDMI, microSD card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Miracast support all built into a fanless design.
Customers who are interested in purchasing one will have to wait until September 24th. They’ll also receive 100GB of cloud storage on Microsoft OneDrive for two years with each purchase.