Scott Wingo Business: HP ElitePad 900 review: A rugged Win 8 tablet for business road warriors

The HP ElitePad 900 is a tough son of a tablet. Designed for business or outdoor use, it is built to survive being dropped, dinged, dusted, and handled roughly enough to make an iPad cry. HP has tested it to the military MIL-STD810G standard for dust, vibration, temperatures high and low, humidity, altitude, and drop-proofing for heights of up to 30 inches.

Most uber-durable devices end up looking like the back end of a tank, but the ElitePad 900 is quite attractive. Just 9.2mm thick and weighing less than 1.4 pounds, with a CNC-milled aluminum back (CNC refers to computer numerical control in manufacturing), a front that's covered in Gorilla Glass 2, and rounded corners, this tablet is small and sleek enough not to look out of place in the office.

While it is rugged, it’s no speed demon: With just a 1.8GHz Intel Atom Z2760 single-core processor and only 2GB of RAM, the ElitePad 900 managed a teeth-grindingly low Notebook Worldbench 8.1 score of 43. That’s the lowest score we’ve seen with our updated test suite, and is less than half of the mark on our reference device, the Asus VivoBook S550CA.

HP's rugged ElitePad 900 runs Windows 8.

Some will argue that a tablet shouldn’t be compared to a notebook, but the two kinds of hardware really aren’t all that different. Essentially, one has a physical keyboard and the other typically doesn’t. In this case, much of the ElitePad 900’s performance shortcomings come from its reliance on Intel’s Atom processor (and its integrated GPU), and a paucity of RAM (which the CPU and the integrated GPU must share). This rendered the ElitePad incapable of running any of our game benchmarks.

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Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043399/hp-elitepad-900-review-a-rugged-win-8-tablet-for-business-road-warriors.html#tk.rss_laptopcomputers