Slate Fever Hits CES 2010
HP's Slate, due the second half of 2010
Day one of CES this year has been dominated by Slate PC’s. These are the industries second attempt at the tablet, however these are much much more than just tablet PC’s. Think of them as netbooks, just without keyboards or large smart phones, just without the phone.
There where three Slate PC’s shown during Microsoft keynote speech, each of which will come with Windows 7 preloaded. These slates where manufactured by HP, Archos & Pegatron with particular stress placed on HP’s prototype (pictured to the right). Dell also got in with the action in their own conference, announcing a 5 inch device with an inbuilt 3G connection. As of the publication of this article, no specifications have yet been released for either the HP, Dell or Pegatron Slate PCs. The Archos 9 will be powered by a 1.1Ghz Intel Atom with 1GB of memory and a 60GB 1.5″ hard drive.
The rumour mill out of Cupertino says that Apple are hard at work on their own version of the slate concept and given Apple’s ability to revolutionise what a product is, as they did with portable music players & mobile phones, it will be very interesting to see what they come up with.
That said, I believe the whole point of Slate PC’s is in question as they are too big to fit in your pocket and with smart phones running operating systems such as Android, Windows Mobile & Apple’s iPhone OS, the question is do we really want to carry around yet another portable computer when our phones are more than capable?
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