HP revealed plans to re-enter the smartphone market in India last year, starting with two Slate VoiceTab phablets, but until this week it wasn't known whether they were headed to the UK. That changed at Mobile World Congress, where HP confirmed it was planning to launch the handsets in other territories, giving us our first chance to try them out to bring you some hands-on impressions.
The more compact Slate 6 VoiceTab will be sold as a "voice-enabled tablet" rather than phablet smartphone. At 8.6mm thick and weighing 160g, it's fairly light and compact, but the plastic construction makes it feel a little cheap in the hand. A metal effect trim around the edges looks fairly sleek form a distance, but again is actually made from plastic.
A 6in, 1,280x720 resolution display fills the entire front of the handset; there are no physical buttons as the VoiceTab uses the virtual buttons of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. A pixel density of 245ppi means it's possible to spot the individual pixels, making text and images look a little fuzzy compared to Full HD screens of a similar size, but it's perfectly serviceable for a mid-range handset. At least the IPS panel helps create wide viewing angles and the screen was very bright.
On the back, removable rear covers hide the dual SIM-card slots. There's one full-size slot and one micro-SIM slot, which can be used simultaneously for putting work and personal SIMs in a single handset. There's also a 3,000mAh battery, which can be swapped out should you buy a spare.
The rear-facing camera has a 5-megapixel sensor, with autofocus and an LED flash. We took a few snaps during our brief hands-on and images looked reasonably sharp, although the incredibly bright show floor couldn't tell us how the VoiceTab will perform in low light. There's also an HD webcam on the front for video chats.
HP has opted not to overhaul Google's default Android user interface with its own custom skin, only adding a selection of pre-installed apps. However, these only add useful functionality if you happen to have an HP wireless printer. Android certainly felt responsive, but with no demanding apps pre-installed and no internet connection we weren't able to test its raw performance. A quad-core Marvell PXA1088 processor running at 1.2GHz processor, paired with 1GB RAM suggest the VoiceTab isn't going to be a powerhouse, but should be more than capable of everyday tasks like web browsing and posting to Facebook. 16GB of internal storage can be expanded with a microSD card, up to a maximum of 32GB.
Available in a range of colours, including blue, green, pink, purple, grey and white, the Slate 6 VoiceTab is set to cost around £250 when it arrives in the UK later in the year. That makes it significantly cheaper than competing phablets such as theGalaxy Note 3 and Xperia Z Ultra.
It will ship with HP's DataPass service, which bundles two years of mobile broadband in the box. It is powered by Fogg mobile, and will provide 250MB of monthly data at 3G speeds.
The larger Slate 7 VoiceTab will also include DataPass. It has a larger screen than the Slate 6, with the IPS panel increased from 6in to 7in. It also gets a slight resolution boost, up to 1,280x800, but pixel density actually drops to 215ppi. This makes it even easier to see individual pixels, but otherwise screen quality is about right for the price with bright colours and decent viewing angles.
Internally, the Slate 7 VoiceTab is basically identical to the Slate 6; it has the same processor, memory, front and rear cameras, storage capacity and operating system. It will be available through HP's online store in the UK and across Europe, with prices starting from €229/£188.
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