HP Plunges Downmarket With A $99 Windows Tablet, $199 Windows Notebook

The race to the bottom is back. Reminiscent of the netbook war of yesteryear, HP justfollowed Toshiba’s lead with a $99 tablet along with introducing a $199 Windows notebook. Expect to see these colorful devices at a department superstore near you.HP hasn’t revealed the specs powering these Windows 8 machines. That’s by design and as we’ve said for years, the spec is dead anyway. HP is clearly hoping to sell these devices on price alone although both include one year of Office 365 and 60 minutes of Skype calls each month.The 7-inch HP Stream 7 costs $99 while the 8-inch HP Stream 8 is $149 and comes with 200MB of LTE data each month. The 11-inch HP Stream 11 notebook is $199, and likewise, the 13-inch HP Stream 13 is $229. These machines are squarely aimed at Chromebooks. Using the familiar Windows brand, Microsoft and its hardware partners such as HP and Toshiba, hope to stem the tide of consumers looking and finding something new in Google’s enticing Chromebook hardware.