Is this HP’s new tablet, running Windows 7? And if so, are they nuts?

The hardware looks fairly nice—complete with Windows and “Intel Inside” advertising stickers!—but as always, trying to run a desktop operating system on a touchscreen device is an instant failure. It’s clear that nothing is made to be tapped, it’s all a hacky touch layer on top of a system made for a mouse. You can even see the mouse pointer for a second when the system loads before whatever script comes along and hides it. The reviewer describes the scrolling as “pretty fast.” He’s nuts too.

It looks as if HP and others think that the success of the iPad just means that the tablet computer’s time has finally come, and they can release the same thing they’ve been trying to make work for years with a new case that makes it look like an iPad. They’re very wrong. The iPad’s success isn’t because the world was suddenly ready for it, it’s because Apple started from scratch. Because they’re not lazy as fuck, and because they care obsessively about user experience. Sometimes too obsessively, sure, but that’s better than this garbage.

The topper is the dedicated hardware button to summon the onscreen keyboard. You actually have to push this button to make the keyboard appear, even if you’ve just tapped into a text field. WTF.

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13 replies on “Is This the HP Slate?”

  1. Apple didn’t start from scratch with the iPad, they started from the iPhone. The iPad is just a really, really big iPhone on which you can’t make or take calls. Which is no great loss, since iPhone is just a really, really small tablet with a kinda sucky phone app.

  2. This is pure shit. I’m waiting to see if there will be any game changing going on when Android tablets are released. I’m optimistic. The more (actually user friendly) tablets there are out there, the better it will be for everyone.

  3. The Ipad wasn’t successful because it was built from the ground up. It was successful because Apple are great marketers, and there’s lots of gullible people out there willing to pay over the odds for something that does less than the competition so long as it has a cool image.

    It amazes me still that they could say they’ve built something from the ground up, and yet not have the imagination to come up with a single previously-unseen feature. But hey, people will always buy them, and act superior about their stupid consumer choices, because Apple fanboys have even less of a grip on reality than Justin Bieber fans.

  4. It’s not a consumer product. They’ll aim this at vertical markets with legacy Windows apps — medical, industrial, financial, etc.

    There’s a reason HP bought Palm, and a reason they’re not talking about this device publicly. They’ll quietly sell a decent number to businesses — the form factor makes a lot of sense in the medical field especially. Doctors/hospitals can roll them out without having to build iPad apps from scratch, and they don’t have to reinvent their security/authentication model to accommodate a new OS that doesn’t play nice with Active Directory.

    HP’s biggest problem with this device will be convincing Microsoft to NOT advertise it. HP knows it’s not an iPad competitor, but Microsoft won’t have a viable consumer touch interface until Windows 8 (or Windows Phone 8) at the earliest.

    HP’s consumer slate will probably run webOS, and if that development runs into problems, it will be relatively easy for HP to make the same device run Android 3.0 (Gingerbread).

  12. I knew someone who was working on Microsoft’s Tablet PC a long time ago. Does anyone know what happened to that? I never saw it advertised or anything.

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