How bad is the HP Slate 7? Real bad.

Seven months ago, I wrote a post about buying an HP Slate 7 and returning it right away.  I didn't really use the tablet heavily before returning it because it wouldn't charge on my standard USB charger.  That was enough to declare the tablet "crap".  It seems that other people have reached the same conclusion as me.  A little more background first.

My company logs the device model for everyone that logs on.  This gives us the ability to generate statistics on what devices are being used.  We wanted to gather the data based on our clients, not based on the number of registered phones or whatever metric some other company uses to determine market share.  When we gather the device models, we know it pertains to our user base.  This data comes in handy for multiple reasons but the one reason that came up today was test hardware purchasing.  We buy phones and tablets to test our software on and we want to buy the hardware that is most common among our user base.

When generating this report, I noticed something weird.  There was a device model called "cm_tenderloin".  I was something I had seen before because one of our clients with an issue had this device.  "cm_tenderloin" is the Cyanogenmod device name for the HP Touchpad.  The HP Touchpad that doesn't run Android....it runs WebOS.  On its own, this is not weird.  People install after market firmware on lots of devices.  It wouldn't be weird to see "some" hits with this device name.  The weird thing was the "cm_tenderloin" device name showed almost 5 times (about 4.8x for the month and a half window) more logons than the HP Slate 7!

This tells a rather interesting story.  It seems that people would rather buy an old HP Touchpad and install Cyanogenmod on it than buy an HP Slate 7.  It seems the Cyanogenmod install process must be easier than the HP Slate 7 install process (which was difficult for me, given the charger issues).  This is even more incredible because Amazon (as of 2/21/2014) lists the HP Slate 7 at $200 vs $270 for the HP Touchpad (16GB models for both).  I know a big difference is size.  The HP Slate 7 is a 7in screen while the HP Touchpad is a 10in screen.  Our clients still feel the Touchpad is the better buy.