HP’s much-rumored Slate has finally come out in the open. It’s basically a tablet computer sans-keyboard, offering users a compact, touch-based screen to move around with instead of a physical keyboard.
The demos show that it runs on Windows 7 too, so it should be pretty easy to use–at least for people who have used a PC within the past 10 years. The Slate has been demonstrated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer running Amazon’s Kindle reader app for Windows, so doubling as a digital reader seems like a pretty big focus (and why wouldn’t it? Everyone else has been putting out readers anyway).
HP has also been showing off a smartbook running on an Android OS. What’s a “smartbook” you ask? It’s what you’d get if you mated a netbook with a smartphone (no, we’re not going to describe how to get a netbook and a smartphone to mate). It looks like a netbook, but runs a smartphone’s operating system). This device basically looks like a netbook, but runs with smartphone innards, like the aforementioned Android OS and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor; a chip usually found running some of the most powerful smartphones in the market. The smartbook is described to feature an “all-day battery,” with a power-efficient system based on flash memory.
Official specs and details for the Slate haven’t been made available yet, but we do know it’s going to be released within the year (and it looks like it’s all good to go head-to-head with Apple’s rumored tablet). The smartbook is apparently a prototype, with no official word on a release just yet.
Tags: HP, HP Slate, Tablet PCs, Tablets, Tablets
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