HP has finally officially unveiled its Slate 500 tablet, a tablet which was supposed to be the Frankenfruity but ended up cancelled, and then resurrected as a corporate thing with a digitiser for text input. Yeah yeah, it looks like pretty decent hardware, but please put some ARM stuff in there, put webOS on it, and then we’ll talk, HP. Until then – toodles!
There were some engineering prototypes running Android 1.6… I wonder why they decided to scrap that and just go with Windows. That was almost a year ago though.
Edited 2010-10-22 23:05 UTC
I guess they figured to give it another try and see if it does any better with the renewed interest in the Tablet PC market.
I doubt the outcome will be any different.
Here, the OS matters.
The Arstechnica article went into detail that it isn’t aimed at the consumer market given its entry price – its aimed at business customers:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/10/hp-slate-launches-for-7…
It is interesting that Ballmer was talking about Windows 7 not ready for the slate/tablet but HP is shipping a slate/tablet with it – when he was saying it was he talking about ‘out of the box’ versus the amount of customisation that HP probably did to get it up to speed? I wonder whether Windows 7 is the best operating system for the job when a WP7 with a different GUI would have probably been a better fit.
Interesting enough Microsoft has announced that Windows XP is no longer allowed to be installed on new computers – I wonder what Microsofts strategy in the future is? Will a future service pack from Microsoft will include some optimisations for small form factor devices that need something more than what WP7/Windows EC 7.0 (due for release end of the year) can offer.
Having a tablet would be a nice addition to the toolset of corporate employees. And I am not talking about specialists with dedicated applications. Its the office worker that could benefit from a tablet. Nowadays they bring their smartphone to meetings and that device allows them realtime access to information like email, calender, twitter, some limited browsing.
But the small formfactor of the display, which is desirable for a phone, is not suited for note taking, looking up information on the corporate websites (Sharepoint e.g.), give a presentation. For that they take now notebooks to a meeting, which are heavy, bulky, and the opened notebook on the table puts a physical barrier between the people in the meeting.
A tablet would do much better. Small, like a paper notepad. Easy to read due to its larger size. Link it to a beamer and you can present your ideas.
Now corporates also have to consider (at least the IT people) how to incorporate these tablets in the infrastructure. Smartphones are quite limited and just email and calender is not to difficult, most can interface to Exchange e.g. Running corporate apps is not an issue, because you cant. The browser is limited so the web apps are not used due to compatibility issues and lack of screen space.
With tablets you can do much more and so the demands are much higher for ease and cost of management, security and such. Windows 7 is what most PCs and notebooks will run (yea, I know, XP has to go one day) and having tablets run the same OS is such a big advantage then.
Cost of hardware and licenses is a part of the Total Cost of Ownership. Often I see that support is the larger part in the TCO, especially when the OS or application is special. Special OS and applications means learning curves, limited number of people able to give support, higher costs. So Windows 7 tablets with the standard corporate applications available are interesting for corporations. So the price of the HP slate is not an issue for corporate, it also comes with a dock etc.
Whether this HP slate will be a success due to Windows 7? Only time will tell. It has the right specs, like USB, front and back cameras, SD card, enough memory for Windows 7 (2GB), storage 64 Gb. 1024×600 is not that much, the Atom is just good enough. Multi Touch with finger and a stylus are a good combo, for some jobs fingers are too thick!
For the end users tablet == iPad.
For the IT nerds in system management tablet == Android. Windows is boring. To have a Windows 7 tablet is therefore not the obvious choice, even if it will integrate smoothly in the infrastructure with adequate knowledge, support and security. And corporate Windows apps, be it client/server or web based will run.
Edited 2010-10-23 14:48 UTC
You say it like it was a bad thing
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Still waiting for the heir to the Nokia tablets…