HP ElitePad Review

I don’t normally write reviews, but wanted to write a review on the HP ElitePad. Mainly I wanted to write a review to warn people of how bad the HP ElitePad is and ward them from buying them.

The HP ElitePad, is not really a business ready tablet. The main reason for this is the trouble experienced with the quality (or rather, the lack of quality) of the device’s ability to PXE boot. The PXE boot is very temperamental and you may need to reboot many, many times before it picks up the PXE. Additionally, it’s difficult to reboot the device. Sometimes when you hold the power button it reboots, sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it gives you startup options. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. My final gripe with it (so far) is that it’s difficult to get into the BIOS (because of the issues with rebooting). My colleague’s have been having similar issues with the HP ElitePad devices.

You might expect that the behavior described would be due to a one off hardware fault, but I have experienced this on all the HP ElitePads that we have bought. I don’t believe that these were all bought together, so it’s also unlikely to be a bad batch, though it’s conceivible that this could be the case.

To be fair, a friend of mine owns one for home use and loves his poor mans iPad; his review of the device might look a little different. I imagine he would say that it does the trick, feels sturdy and was well priced.

To summarise the review:

I do not recommend the HP ElitePad for business use. It might be good for home use, but if you have any issues with it and need to reinstall the operating system, it might be ugly. That being said, most tablet users would suffer this issue.

I give the HP ElitePad a 2 out of 5.