One of my least-known computers is an HP Elitepad 900 I purchased around 5-6 years ago. This is a Windows 8 tablet, which is a pretty unusual beast; MS had not invented the Surface at that stage. The Elitepad is a business tablet, which for its spec was relatively expensive, but it is designed to be solid and serviceable, with the chassis made out of metal and held together by magnets rather than being glued together as most cheap domestic tablets would be.
The design of the Elitepad for business security intentions of the design is such that it has very few ports on the tablet itself. Basically all the bits on it are the home button, power button, rotation lock switch, headphone port, camera, volume up/down buttons, microSD slot (under a cover) and dock connector. Various accessories including the charger can be plugged into the dock connector. I purchased mine with an expansion jacket, which encloses the tablet and has space inside for an optional second battery (not installed) and connects to the Elitepad’s dock connector. The jacket adds its own dock connector as well as an SD card slot, HDMI port and two USB ports. The system comes with 2 GB of RAM and has a 64 GB SSD installed.
Inside, the Elitepad has an Atom Z2760 processor, and it comes with the full version of Windows 8 installed (not Windows RT). At the time I purchased it, Windows 8.1 became available and I was able to download the update from HP and install it off a pen drive. The charging adapter supplied with it provides 9 volts at approx 1 amp. This model was available with an optional SIM slot for direct connection to a cellular data network, but I chose to purchase the Wifi version.
The most use I ever had with the tablet in the past was when I was studying a few years ago and used it instead of a laptop (I actually didn’t own a laptop until quite recently). I got a Logitech bluetooth keyboard and MS Wedge Touch mouse to use with it, and a third party stand for it to sit on an angle like a regular screen. I installed a few different apps on it and used it at several tertiary instutions whilst I was studying.
Recently I hauled it out of the cupboard to use as an e-book reader and found it still has 95% of its battery life remaining, according to the wear level reading using software to check the onboard battery. Because of this I intend to use it as much as possible with the Kindle app. However, after uninstalling some software, I could not get Kindle to run on it, and eventually ended up recovering it. If you haven’t done a device or computer recovery before, OEM manufacturers will set up a special partition on the HDD (64 GB SSD in this case) for the reinstallation of Windows. You simply follow a few on screen prompts and leave the tablet running for a while until the recovery is complete. Prior to that I had checked if I had a chance of putting Lubuntu on it; but I discovered from a support article that it will only boot a pen drive that has Windows 8 installed.
The recovery worked as expected but it took a very long time to get it to install Windows 8.1 with the first step being more than 150 updates to Windows 8 and then several failed upgrade attempts, after which to my surprise after leaving it sitting on the charger for a few days I was presented with a Windows 8.1 installation prompt. So it looks like it is going to work well. But I will want to get a second charger for it because of the ill considered HP design decision that it can only be charged via the proprietary docking port. As the charger will have to come from the US it will not be cheap.