HP Slate 500 - Windows 7 tablet PC
A device that made its deabuit last January in the hands of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, is now an official HP product, the HP Slate.
As you would expect of a divice held by a Microsoft employee, the HP Slate 500 runs Windows 7 complete with a built in Ctrl-Alt-Del button. The Slate 500, is touted by HP as a business product.
Available on HP’s site for $799, the 8.9-inch capacitive touch screen Slate comes with a dock and case, powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540 processor, 2GB of RAM, 64GB SSD and Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator for 1080p video. The dock has an HDMI-out port. It has a front facing VGA cam and 3 megapixel camera on its back.
Its main draw back is that it runs Windows 7 which is not a good tablet interface for the casual user. While everyone else knows that a full desktop OS squeezed into a tablet doesn’t work, Microsoft and HP are yet to catch on.
Having said that HP acquired Palm a while back and while there are no official rumblings about the release of WebOS tablet on it’s way from HP we expect you will see one shortly.
HP’s Slate is a business product aimed at all the sectors that use touch/pen entry. These include hospitality, insurance, retail, restaurants.
HP’s webOS tablets will be a lot more exciting and they will be better suited to where the tablet market is heading, not where it stagnated for years.
So far this piece of trash has been a complete headache. The software won’t set up totally on my Dell desktop with Windows XP. (but it will on my new Toshiba laptop). It should be the plainest thing to install a printer, yet HPs computer software is crap. Ugliest OF ALL, when I attempt to uninstall, the ‘HP Order Reminder’ that was set up foremost for some reason, they won’t let me uninstall it! Like I desire a ‘reminder’ of when to purchase more HP wares.