HP Slate Officially Launches for $799 | Hacker News Reader

HP Slate Officially Launches for $799

mashable.com

16 pointsjrwoodruff40 comments

Fantastic. A touch-screen with small buttons, stock Windows 7. Ships with IE8. $200-$300 more than an iPad: you could buy a netbook and an iPad for the same price.

WTF? Total shit. Who wants Windows 7 on a tablet?

Actually, I kind of do, but not for $800. Not everyone likes the constraints of iOS, you know.

Right. So you just reinforced the original comment's point. You don't want one because it's too expensive.

Well, I was responding to this part: "Who wants Windows 7 on a tablet?"

ok, sorry. i misinterpreted it as "who wants win7 on a tab for $800?"

I'm a heavy user of Captivate and Camtasia and I teach math. I need digital ink for my classes. It allows me to markup graphs and all other documents. I would be a user of this tablet. I think the greatest shortcoming of the iPad is the lack of digital ink and native pen support. Also, screen recording apps.

From the promo videos it seems that this device is targeting vertical markets.

> I would be a user of this tablet. I think the greatest shortcoming of the iPad is the lack of digital ink and native pen support.

My wife agree's. She's also a teacher of math and physics and she was excited to get an iPad until she found out she couldn't use a stylus to mark with.

if this tablet fulfills that need then this may be the tablet for her.

There are some very nice feeling styluses (and some that aren't nice feeling at all, too) that work on iPad - this one from Griffin is by far my favorite from the ones I've tried. http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/stylus

The problem though is that a stylus is not enough by itself. What is needed is the concept of digital ink. With my tablet PC I can markup any object that can be printed.

I didn't know this, thank you:)

The use case my wife has is she wants to mark math homework, similarly to how you would mark it on paper, ie arbitrary pen input anywhere.

Does the iPad allow for this? or is there any app that does this?

It’s very different from an iPad and there will probably be very, very few people who will want it but there will be some (i.e. it will be about as successful as all other tablet PCs of the last decade).

If HP wants to beat the iPad – that’s how Ballmer framed it, HP doesn’t seem to see it that way – this is an unmitigated disaster. The HP Slate has potential to be a nice niche product, not to beat the iPad. Or, to put it in another way, the iPad and iPad-class devices have a shot at changing the future of computing, this has not.

You gotta love the slide out licensing tab: http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-slate-hands-on/#3494156

Can't see this doing well:

- Uncompetitive price.

- No 3G.

- Odd quilted effect on rear. Nobody's going to buy it because of that, and it will only look tacky in the long run.

- Distracting HP logo at the edge of the screen, looks bad when held vertically.

From the video linked to by BigZaphod, a lot of it is a guy working on a spreadsheet or presentation everywhere he goes. It's not exactly an inspiring scenario - there have even been cases of people choosing holiday locations for their lack of BlackBerry reception.

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyers_wrestle_with_...

I can predict the market response: "meh".

EDIT: I figured I should add that I have looked at the large touchscreen PCs as sold in Best Buy, etc. and while the concept looks very intriguing, playing around with them for even a few minutes shows why they would be frustrating in practice.

The UI requires too much precision - for instance, to close an application you have to stab precisely on the X in the upper right corner - there should be a modification that is either more forgiving or the X should be larger, etc.

Further, higher resolution (which should be nicer) is just as bad if not worse - as the need for precision increases.

Lastly, the focus by the big manufacturers still seems to be "stack em deep and sell em cheap" - leaving little $$$ or motivation to improve the UI to a level as good as an iPad.

I think that NotionInk.com is on to something, though when shipping product will arrive, I don't know.

I remember some time ago seeing a Youtube video of a leaked testing version of the Slate. The reviewer flipped it over and pointed out the hardware ctrl+alt+del button on the side. Everybody thought the video and device were fakes or a prank, because who in their right mind would include a hardware ctrl+alt+del button? But now I see according to this Wired article that it is indeed for real: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/hp-slate-official-800...

The article mentions the button though I can't see the button myself in the pics. Way to go, HP!

I think it's the button to the left of the home button in this : http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-slate-hands-on/#3494151

Here's one of their promo videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX-B2wG1e4&feature=playe...

That video makes it look even worse. Don't they realize that people can type faster than they can write with a pen? It took that guy a long time to pull out the pen, write "Rear Light" and put the pen back. Should have been <2 seconds with a touch keyboard.

It's just so weird! It's like they are advertising to an alternate universe where the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch don't exist. I can't believe how slow and laggy it looks in their own video. How can they not see this?

I actually laughed out loud when the doctor zoomed in on the x-ray and there was visible lag and tearing as the screen refreshed. That's the best shot they could come up with to show off zoom!?

At least you know they're not faking the video...

Evidently you've never tried to write something like "Rear Light" one-handed on the iPad keyboard. Or, you don't have ogre fingers like I do.

More seriously, the pen is pretty fantastic for things like reviewing papers. Having used tablet PCs for years and now having used an iPad for a while, I can say it takes significantly longer to annotate PDFs via iAnnotate or goodreader and either my finger or the iPad keyboard than it did with Acrobat and the pen+tablet pc input panel.

I just tried typing "Rear light" on my iPad with one finger of my right hand while holding the pad itself with my left hand. It took about 2 seconds. On my iPhone, with only my left hand holding it and using my left thumb to type leaving my right hand doing nothing, I can bang that phrase out in about... 2 seconds. In the promo video, it took the guy just about 5 seconds with the pen.

Not that this matters a whole lot - just adding my own data points to the discussion. :)

I agree that the keyboard on the iPad is hard to type on, but from the looks of the video, the latency with pen writing would be even more annoying!

Have you looked at the Pogo Sketch?

Thanks for the promo link. It appears their target audience are people who need to write things while having a full blown OS. I teach math and tablet PCs have been a great help. People simply do not type math or read typed mathematics well. I'm a heavy user of Captivate and Camtasia and this is the sort of tablet I need.

Wow, it lags when zooming a picture (0:17), in their promo video. Not inspiring.

At the same time, kudos for showing actual product performance. Thanks to their advertising, I feel like I can make an accurate judgment of the device's performance.

Contrast the Slate's ad to the overly-aggressive critique of Nokia's advertising for the N97 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU

Fair enough - I guess I was taking the perspective that since things are usually portrayed unrealistically in a promo video like this, the perf must really suck.

Cool, so it's got a 1.8 gigahertz processor, and 2 gigs of ram and... and.... What's the battery life?

Unless HP is aiming for people to run Solidworks on this, a nominal amount of processing power is a given these days. The truly important question is battery life, more so for a 'business tablet' than an iPad 'toy'.

(I don't think the iPad is a toy, but HP's position that theirs is for business; they're saying that the iPad's a toy)

With the Galaxy Tab and now the HP Slate priced the same or higher than the iPad, I wonder if the "Apple tax" meme will give way to a "non-Apple tablet tax".

If history is any indicator, it's only a matter of time before the pc tablet prices drop below the cost of the iPad.

ummm, what history of pc tablet prices dropping below ipad prices is this?

the history i'm aware of is when mac products start out fairly expensive then slowly drop in price over new generation releases.

One thing going for it: They almost resisted putting intel/windows stickers all over it. http://goo.gl/vXKi

Please don't use URL shorteners here. Space isn't a constraint, and lots of people like knowing where a link goes to (in this case, it's just an image of the tablet, so it's safe, but it could lead anywhere).

See the link elsewhere on this page to the slide-out plastic drawer whose only purpose is to carry the rest of the stickers on it. WTF.

I don't understand why it is priced so high. If you look at a similarly spec'd netbook for $400-$500, plus a touch screen (say +$100), you should still be under $799. Does Windows 7 really cost that much more? What on earth makes it that much more expensive when it doesn't even have 3G?

Windows 7? HP, come on, you're better than that.

Great. When can I get Android on it?

wow what fail..

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