Little Windows tablet packs a great webcam, but little pep

HP's 11-inch Windows tablet offers a terrific display and camera, but its performance and battery life are letdowns.

Low-priced Windows tablets (or detachable 2-in-1 models with snap-on keyboards) are less popular than Android or iPadOS tablets for good reason—most struggle with day-to-day tasks and don't include accessories. That describes the Microsoft Surface Go 3 and the HP competitor seen here, the Tablet 11-be0097nr ($379.99 as tested, exclusive of its key accessories). The 11-inch HP slate has some good qualities—its touch screen offers a better image than you'd get from an inexpensive laptop, and its rotating camera is impressively sharp and colorful.

But its battery life is too short, its Intel Pentium Silver CPU will have you yawning and drumming your fingers waiting for basic operations, it has only one USB port and no headphone jack, and you'll pay an extra $218 for a pen and keyboard cover. Unless you truly need Windows in tablet form at a very low cost, the 2021 Apple iPad delivers a superior tablet experience, while the admittedly much pricier Microsoft Surface Pro 8 remains the gold standard for laptop-replacement Windows tablets. Among budget convertibles, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14 is a larger but much more capable option.

At 0.32 by 9.9 by 7 inches (HWD), the Tablet 11 is almost the same size as the Surface Go 3 (0.33 by 9.7 by 6.9 inches) and the 2021 iPad (0.3 by 9.8 by 6.8 inches). The touch screen isn't borderless, but a tablet's shouldn't be; the bezels are just wide enough for you to grip the device without your fingers smudging the screen.

Build quality is first-class, with a slick Gorilla Glass 5 display and an aluminum casing. There's no flex or flimsy feel. My only possible gripe is that silver is the only available color.

The Tablet 11 weighs a tolerable 1.32 pounds; its included fabric kickstand adds another pound. The Surface Go 3 is just 1.2 pounds with a built-in kickstand, but it's less versatile since its kickstand doesn't work in portrait (vertical) mode and isn't a protective cover. The HP earns another point for working in portrait mode with its keyboard. (See the keyboard connectors in the photo below.) Strong magnets ensure the kickstand won't come loose unintentionally.

The Tablet 11's most intriguing feature is its rotating camera, which works as a front- or rear-facing shooter. Its rotation is actually motorized, not manual; pressing a button spins the camera 180 degrees in about two seconds. It can rotate further while front-facing so your face is centered in the picture.

The camera excels at face-to-face video chats, shooting clear and well-lit full HD (1080p) video at 30 frames per second with effective autofocus. It's light-years ahead of the cheap 720p webcams found on nearly all laptops. HP's GlamCam widget, which opens when the camera is activated, offers low-light adjustment, keystone correction, framing, digital zoom settings, and preferences for apps like Microsoft Teams and Zoom Meetings.

The camera also captures stills up to 12.6 megapixels, an impressive resolution for a tablet camera. It does reasonably well with highlights, though a basic smartphone would fare just as well. The sample shots below don't do it full justice—this is a superb videoconferencing camera.

The HP Tablet 11's other big selling point is its 11-inch touch screen. Its 2K (2,160-by-1,440-pixel) resolution is higher than the 1,920 by 1,280 pixels of the Surface Go 3.

The picture is very good; our DataColor SpyderX Elite measured it at 383 nits of brightness, close enough to HP's claimed 400 nits. I also measured a respectable 98% coverage of the sRGB color gamut coverage and 77% of Adobe RGB. The glass surface is crystal-clear, though it's easy to smudge. Sun glare is a problem outdoors, but that's typical of most such screens.

Artists and writers will want to get HP's Rechargeable MPP 2.0 Tilt Pen ($69). Sized like a normal pen (5.9 by 0.4 inches), it has two buttons and includes extra tips.

The tablet's glass screen is too slick to feel like you're writing on paper, but you can get used to it easily enough. The pen has a handy battery indicator on the eraser end that blinks red when the battery is low; it plugs into a USB-C port to recharge.

The other accessory you'll likely want is the HP Tablet Keyboard. It snaps onto the slate magnetically, adding 0.6 pound of weight and 0.2 inch of thickness. Its Microsoft Surface-like $149 price seems steep since it doesn't add extra ports or functionality beyond typing and isn't backlit.

That said, the keyboard provides a snappy, engaging typing feel despite its undersize keys, and its touch pad tracks and clicks nicely. The fabric covering is refreshing, too, and the keyboard doesn't need batteries. Like most other detachables, though, the setup doesn't work well on anything but a solid surface. Your lap, for instance, is a no-go.

Port selection is one of the HP slate's weaknesses, its sole physical connector being a USB 3.2 Type-C port. There are no other ports, not even a headphone jack.

Making matters worse, the USB-C port is also used for power, so you can't connect any wired peripherals while charging the tablet. The Surface Go 3 does better on this score, with a dedicated power jack. Meanwhile, the HP's power button is further along the left edge; it doubles as a fingerprint reader. (The camera, as fancy as it is, doesn't support facial recognition for logging in.) Rounding out the physical features are a volume rocker and a nonfunctional nano-SIM slot on top, the latter presumably for a future model with mobile broadband.

Audio is another area where the Tablet 11 could have done better. Its twin speakers project strained sound through slits in the bottom of the screen.

The Tablet 11-be0097nr reviewed here (the only available version at this writing) has a 1.1GHz, quad-core Intel Pentium Silver N6000 processor, 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, a 128GB PCIe solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home in S Mode, along with support for Intel Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth wireless. It's backed by a one-year warranty. The base configuration of Microsoft's Surface Go 3 (also a Pentium-based model) offers just half the RAM and storage for $20 more, though the price difference narrows once you factor in the accessories.

Using the Tablet 11 for everyday tasks requires patience. The Pentium Silver's minimal power signature, which allows the tablet to be fanless and silent, limits its performance. Scrolling through web pages and switching among a few tabs is fairly smooth, but the HP's lack of oomph is obvious everywhere else. Opening the Start menu is a chore; installing Windows updates takes a long time. Even with 8GB rather than 4GB of RAM, the tablet was unable to complete some of our benchmark tests, though the 128GB SSD is a big improvement on poky eMMC flash storage.

Besides the Core i3-powered Surface Go 3 we tested (our Go 3 review sample was an upgrade from Microsoft's $399 Pentium starter model), I matched the HP against the $749, OLED-screened Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED T3300, which has the same Pentium Silver N6000 chip. The high-end Surface Pro 8 and thrifty Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14 convertible round out the test group.

Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. We consider 4,000 points the threshold for solid everyday productivity, and the Tablet 11 (and Surface Go 3) barely scored half that. Its low storage test score indicates its SSD is no great shakes, either. The entry-level Lenovo laptop did far better.

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

The Tablet 11 performed poorly even next to the Vivobook Slate, which uses the same CPU. I noticed the HP got toasty while testing, so it was likely thermally throttling its performance. (The Asus model being much bigger, the internals are likely thermally much more forgiving under load.) Though its 8GB of memory is theoretically sufficient, it joined the 4GB devices in failing to complete our Adobe Photoshop performance test (not graphed here).

We normally run two game simulations or graphics benchmarks, but UL's 3DMark wouldn't install on the HP Tablet 11. It's not much of a loss; our other test, the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, shows this little tablet isn't going to be playing the latest games anytime soon. Browser-based titles or casual games from the Windows Store are likely all it can handle.

PC Labs tests laptops' and tablets’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure the screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen's 50% and peak settings.

I ran the HP's battery test several times, but an unsatisfactory 4 hours and 13 minutes was the best I could squeeze from it. It might have improved had I been able to store our video file on the tablet itself, but there wasn't sufficient local storage space, so I had to play it from an external SSD that drew some power from the USB port. But even HP's advertised battery estimates (from just under seven to nine and a half hours) would place the Tablet 11 at the back of this comparison pack. (Stake it even double the battery life we saw on our tests, and it would still be there.)

That said, the Tablet 11 does offer as nice a screen as you can find at this price, nearly matching the Surface Go 3's brightness while offering finer resolution and topping the Lenovo's display in every way.

The HP Tablet 11 doesn't match up to our favorite Windows economy tablet, Microsoft's Surface Go 3, because of its ho-hum battery life and missing headphone jack. Its few advantages include a sharper screen, more storage, and a removable kickstand cover that works in portrait mode, but they're not enough to offset those cons.

The larger issue is that neither tablet offers a great value or user experience. Sluggish performance makes day-to-day tasks frustrating, and their base prices don't include their costly keyboards and pens. The Apple iPad is a superior tablet, and a budget convertible like the Lenovo is a more productive platform if you really want Windows.

HP's 11-inch Windows tablet offers a terrific display and camera, but its performance and battery life are letdowns.

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Computers are my lifelong obsession. I wrote my first laptop review in 2005 for NotebookReview.com, continued with a consistent PC-reviewing gig at Computer Shopper in 2014, and moved to PCMag in 2018. Here, I test and review the latest high-performance laptops and desktops, and sometimes a key core PC component or two. I also review enterprise computing solutions for StorageReview.

I work full-time as a technical analyst for a business software and services company. My hobbies are digital photography, fitness, two-stroke engines, and reading. I’m a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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