HP Slate to cost $549, have 1.6GHz Atom Z530, 5 hour battery? | Hacker News Reader

HP Slate to cost $549, have 1.6GHz Atom Z530, 5 hour battery?

engadget.com

22 pointsSamAtt26 comments

Even being an anti-apple person, I'm not sure I would give the advantage to HP for the 1.6Ghz Atom over the 1Ghz A4 without some real benchmarks. Also, how lightweight (or not) the OS is will probably determine more than their relative speeds.

You can already buy a normal windows tablet today... it doesn't make sense why manufacturers would try to "re-release" products they already have. You can probably buy a fast dual core tablet PC today that would blow the socks off the 1.6Ghz Atom.

1024x600? Ewwww. I am not a fan of this recent trend of stretching displays as wide and short as possible. Especially for tablets which will often be rotated, the iPad's 4:3 ratio is much better.

HP should have gone for a higher resolution display, as 1024x600 is the current standard for netbooks, which is lacking at times.

At $549 and similar specs to a netbook(of course not counting touchscreen) HP may have a harder time positioning their slate than Apple.

fairly telling how the slide sells the device in the fashion of a traditional pc and not a personal appliance.

The hardware is a bit mediocre as you'd expect from a low end tablet but the big liability is software. Besides HP's launcher and a few of their bundled apps you'll mostly be using traditional Windows software designed for a keyboard & mouse. It's the uncanny valley of computing: Not quite a tablet, not quite a laptop. This is why Windows tablets have always failed in the market. I suppose it would be possible to put x86 Android on here but you'll be stuck mostly with software designed for a SmartPhone sized screen. As we see with the iPad running resolution doubled iPhone apps this is really not a very good experience. ChromeOS is an option but you give up the power and flexibility of a full blown OS -- even in comparison to the iPhone OS.

Yah, but why in the world would you ship Windows7 on it? What about chrome OS?

Chrome isn't due to be official until Dec. While this is rumored to be a summer release. That said HP has plans for Android slates so I'd assume ChromeOS is also a possibility (http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/07/video-of-hps-android-power...)

Because MS gave HP a fair amount of free PR by promoting the Slate on stage at CES? By doing this, MS has helped make the Slate one of the 2 or 3 tablets, out of 50 or so, that anyone mentions by name.

have you used windows 7? also, this thing can run chrome, so close enough, maybe?

what about the ability to multi-task, install hulu desktop, etc?

also, if one needs more than 5 hours of battery life, it's probably a good sign that one should get a laptop or, dare I say, a netbook. why? because you're probably going to end up buying the docks anyway. no one can sit through 10 hrs of facing down and typing on a screen. i promise you that.

Chrome OS has these wonderful little things called "tabs". They do a bangup job of multi-tasking.

(Sorry, your comment just really struck a nerve)

i should clarify, my comment about the mult-tasking was in response to your question of why use windows 7. i should have started a new line. anyway, chrome os to me doesn't make sense, unless such machines are priced well below $200. web apps only? bleh.

It's a strange world where this is the case, but Windows 7 is a lot more open than either ChromeOS or the iPad.7. hromeOS is similar to the iPad in that you're limited in your ability to install the software of your choice - does it even have native programs that you can install?. Isn't that like the complaint so many of us have about the iPad, that it doesn't have a full featured OS?

No, the complaint is that you can't do anything on the iPad that Apple doesn't want you to do. I'm decently sure that you can get to a command line in Chrome OS (not sure if that'd be in the final version), and Google doesn't really go for the whole "only Google" mentality (the only Android device that explicitly disallows non-Market apps is the Motorola Backflip)

Sure, it's not as closed as Apple's systems. However, it's still not a real computer. I want a tablet that is just a laptop running a normal OS, with accommodations for a touch screen. There's no indication a ChromeOS tablet will be anything like that.

/me watches video

So, one of their advertising points on UI is that Cover Flow stutters like Porky Pig? Cover Flow in particular is smooth as silk on almost any laptop I've tried it on, and I'll guarantee that the iPad will handle however many thousands of covers you may have without the slightest pause.

And I find it kind of strange that it could handle 1080p without a problem, but be slow with scrolling images.

Predictive caching is hard. Let's go shopping!

How predictive you need to be to scroll over an ordered list?

You'd like to know how fast they're scrolling and in which direction so you can decide which resources to cache given finite disk and memory bandwidth as well as finite texture memory.

Apple's implementation doesn't bother loading the cover if the album in question is going to be past the edge of the screen before the load would complete. Instead it loads covers further down the line and renders a placeholder image.

Deciding which covers to load without knowing what the user is going to do next (stop the flow, go backwards, speed up) is a classic example of an online scheduling problem.

Did you actually watch the video? They're stepping through covers individually ~3 times (not watching it again) and getting only a few frames of transition each time.

Caching the next and previous covers that are currently off-screen isn't just easy, it's highly likely that it'll be a frequent operation, and should be optimized. If they had scrolled a few dozen in either direction a bit of lag would be expected, but not when iterating.

To make matters worse, this is in an advertisement, and can be expected to perform worse IRL because everyone optimizes for their ads.

Let's not forget Apple gets more footprints into their little tent than HP's retail stores (oh wait, they don't have that kind of success on land).

As iTunes is to iPod, App Store is to iPad. Apple succeeds because of the combo punch, not because its consumers care whether HP has more Ghz or not.

Too bad Compaq didn't make better iPaq's (oh that's right, HP bought them :-p )

5 hour batter. Said enough.

Agreed. The only reason I'm even considering the iPad at this point is for its battery life. 5 hours is a deal killer.

A device with an ARM-based with a tablet-targeted OS and an x86-based Windows 7 device... Why would anyone think they compete?

How long does it take for Windows 7 to start up on that thing? 30 seconds? Yoy have to log-in every time you resume the device like a notebook?

Is it me or is that a really terrible info-graphic.

I can't read the writing, and instead of linking to a larger version it just seems to link back to the page itself.

price, battery life and brand name are three most selling points. If I need to buy tablet why exactly will I buy HP tablet :-/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com