HP Slate Supposedly in the Wild Nets Netbook Comparisons

Posted by | 04/19/2010 | 11 Comments

Engadget is linking to a conecti.ca report that looks to be a hands on with the HP Slate, which until now we’ve really only seen under controlled circumstances. I’ll offer a couple of words of caution here by saying that will the post looks like these folks know their stuff I’m not necessarily taking this at face value yet. Second, you do have to translate the page and on first loading it in Firefox all I got was gobbledey gook. Opening it in Chrome yield a translated page.

The bottom line of the “review” is that the HP Slate is very netbook like in terms of performance which isn’t great news. There’s not much talk about the UI shell that tries to hide Windows. If true, that fulfills an expectation that many have. Here’s hoping this isn’t the real deal.

Again, I’m skeptical.

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Category: Hardware

About the Author (Author Profile)

Warner Crocker is a professional theatre director, producer and playwright and also a Tablet PC enthusiast. He is also a Microsoft MVP for Tablet PCs. Send email to Warner.
  • http://sumocat.blogspot.com Sumocat

    Most important find in this review (which shares nothing we hadn’t already figured out from the specs) is the lack of a pen or pen garage. It may still have an active digitizer (or whatever HP means by “pen/digitizer”), but there’s clearly no place to store a pen.

  • http://tinta-e.blogspot.com Juan Chulilla

    The problem is that the blogger is young and inexperienced. The text is closer to an long comment in someone else’s blog rather than a proper, informative, insightful post.

    The author is also too much impressed by the iPad and is short of experience with different devices. The conclusion is plain ridiculous: Slate is going to compete with netbooks and not with the iPad. ¿Qué? What?

    I don’t know who in HP decided that this young man deserved “the honour of being the first who posted about the real thing”. Maybe is a creative strategy for Spanish Speakers, young blood talking in youngish.

    Yeah, right. What a missed oportunity, anyway.

    AND, por el amor de Dios, hombre, it is said “ad-nauseam”, no “ad-nauseam”. Ad-Nauseam no es que “haya muchos”, sino que una situación se repite demasiado. No vomitas por ver muchos puertos USB. Post said that Slate has “expansion ports ad-nauseum”, which I guess is totally nonsense. What he tries to say is that the device has a lot of expansion port and, trying to produce a sound hyperbole, confuses even Spanish-speakers readers and, of course, Google translator too. You are not going to puke at the sight of a lot of expansion ports.

  • http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com Gordon Watts

    I don’t see a way around the performance problem. I have a netbook as well, and when I have lots of stuff running on it (W7, Outlook, OneNote, etc.) it isn’t the speediest thing alive either. Definately, slower than my wife’s iPad. On the other hand…

    I’m stuck. Because for me, the slate at a minimum needs to run something like OneNote. That requires a full-blown OS, among other things. So performance wise, I don’t see how this can compete with iPad speed.

    While thinking about this it occured to me: MS should port all this stuff to Silverlight (which does pen input just fine, perhaps not with all the gestures, but with 90% of the work). Then run a light-weight OS, and SL plug-ins and now your CPU and memory requirements are much less, and you will start to see real speed.

    The other options is to really cut down W7 a bunch and see if you can’t turn off most things that aren’t needed when running a slate… A fresh, plane install of W7 is actually very quiet… But it will never be as good as a dedicated small-device OS.

  • Benjamin Ries

    I don’t get all the latest buzz on this – didn’t we all know the performance would be netbook-esque when we heard that the Slate was running Win7 on the Atom platform?

    This is no shocker and hardly a tragedy either. The fact that netbooks have done so well sales-wise suggests that a big chunk of the market is willing to accept the performance hit in exchange for lower cost, size and power consumption.

    I share the gut instinct that a clean (optimized) Win7 install will give a performance boost over what HP ships out, and I’m deeply skeptical about whatever goofy touch UI they have slapped on top. I’d probably just use WMC to browse/play media with the finger, or look to install the Origami v2 shell if appropriate.

    As for this “it will never be as good as a dedicated small-device OS”, with respect I think this is becoming kind of a cliche and often fallacious idea. The question is, good on what standard?

    To use an extreme example, wouldn’t a bare install of MS-DOS 6 be both blazingly fast and exceptionally easy on the battery life? (imagine an ASCII TIP, lol). I want to know what it is about Windows 7 that can’t be shut off (i.e. modular components/services) but is still an unnecessary drain on system resources in terms of running desktop-level applications.

    My hunch is: very little. Linux GUI installs may get better speed and battery life out of the same hardware as Win7 on average, but isn’t this a case of self-selecting user groups? The Win7 users include swaths of people who don’t know how to switch from Aero to Aero Basic. But *nix users wouldn’t run Compiz if they were looking for battery life.

    What I’d like to see is an attempt to configure a Win7 netbook install so completely barebones that it simply runs Chrome and nothing else. Then I’d like to see how it fares in a battery match-up with Hexxeh’s latest build on the same hardware. That, imho, would begin to describe the true efficiency difference between *nix and Win7 kernels.

    • http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com Gordon Watts

      This is an interesting question. It would be interseting to see how different the battery life on this device was running Android and W7 where you did a bunch of simple repetitive tasks like:

      1) open http://www.nytimes.com, close it
      2) start email, check for new email from server, shut it down
      3) Doing nothing

      For a while I’ve thought that app stores should collect data like “how much your battery will drain with this app” from users. :-)

      Of course, for some of us, it doesn’t really matter – we have to have W7 or similar because we need things like OneNote…

      I say, can the pen input for Silverlight be moved into OneNote? ;-)

  • acerbic

    Please HP, put it in the hands of someone who is not an iFad fanboi. Everybody complaining about “netbook-like performance” needs to think about how much performance you usually see in a 1.5 lb package. You want more performance, fine: get a 4 lb tablet. I’d be quite happy with this thing if there’s a digitizer and OneNote runs smoothly enough.

  • Mike

    I think the Slate sounds awesome and I’m loving the dock with all those connections, but I’m really disappointed that HP allowed this idiot blogger to be the first to get his hands on it. HP just shot their marketing department in the foot by allowing this Apple fanboy to snap some terrible pictures with his iPhone connected to his MacBook and then trash it as no competition to an iPad because it runs Windows. (Look in the reflection — you can see his iPhone connected to the MacBook The only thing I really learned from this article is that the iPhone takes terrible pictures.

    If I was designing a slate computer this is basically exactly what I would have made. I’m really tired of people dismissing the HP Slate as just another Tablet PC when it’s obvious that we’ve never seen a 1.5lb 9″ tablet PC sold for $550. I wish the last 10 years of Tablet PCs could have been like this.

  • Jonathan

    Well I wonder what the chances are that we can get Courier as a Os on a tegra platform. That the only way I see Microsoft keeping the tablet market. They need to make an OS around the platform. And the sad thing we all know after seeing the demos is that we know Microsoft can do it. That’s what it’s going to take to play ball can MS do it. Come on Microsoft you made your empire by making the software and then licensing it out for OEM’s why should the tablet market be any different. Don’t let apple take this away from you.

  • Osiris

    Surprise Surprise. HP Slate suffers same flaws as every other tablet or full windows device before it….

    The blogger might be ill experienced etc but performance is performance. With that processor and 1GB memory I don’t know why anyone would be surprised.

    Face it, until the technology improves and Windows does for that matter, full operating systems on devices like this are a joke. I still think there’s a place for proper tablets (larger screens, active digitisers etc) but in the sphere of the HP Slate Full Windows is deadly.

    Prediction:
    The future of computing in that space will be Mobile OS (WP7, Android and Courier). If you need the full function that the software on a desktop has you’ll RDP into your own machine or fire up cloud services.

    The benefits: quick, snappy devices with all day battery life that take advantage of the growing ability to connect effortlessly and cloud/RDP for the higher level tasks.

    Thus spoke Zarathustra

    • http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com Gordon Watts

      Right – but is that because the Atom chews up too much battery life and things like ARM and A4 are better? Or is it strickly the OS? I’d like to see some testing. I bet about 70% is the hardware platform and about 30% is the software.

      • Osiris

        You might be correct, but I think at present they are synonomous. You cant run Windows 7 on an ARM chipset and until you can or until intel/amd make some leaps and bounds with mobile cpu’s the software is the issue and the answer is to leverage the power of your mobile operating platforms, namely iphone OS, WP7/CE, Android.

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