Connect with us

Mobile

It’s Alive! The HP Slate 500 arrives with pen + touch, Evernote, and more!

Published

on

After months and months (and months) of floating in limbo, the HP Slate 500 Tablet PC, formerly known simply as the HP Slate, is finally on its way. Having seen leak after leak about the specs and even video of it in action, it may seem like it’s out of surprises, but the official specs and announcement do share a few new items.

First, the report that the 500 is headed for the enterprise channel was no lie. In their official statement, HP describes the Slate as “designed specifically for business, enterprise and vertical customers.” They further cite the industries of “retail, healthcare, insurance, education and hospitality” as target audiences for this business machine, and throw in the “Tablet PC” name for good measure. Basically, if you want one, go online to HP’s business site. Don’t go to Best Buy or Fry’s hoping to catch it.

Second, the specs are, not surprisingly, beefed up from what we saw months ago. Processor is Intel Atom Z540 1.86GHz. Ram is 2GB DDR2. Onboard storage is 64GB SSD. Graphics is Intel GMA 500 with Broadcom Crystal HD Enhanced Video accelerator. OS is bumped up to Windows 7 Professional.

All that is on top of the specs that haven’t changed, including 8.9″ 1024×600 LED-backlit, wide-viewing angle, pen + touch display. Yes, it does come with a pen but, no, they don’t list which digitizer it is. I’m inclined to believe the previous report of N-Trig. Update: Others are reporting Wacom, and it looks more like that from the video. Update 2: Sorry, right the first time. Will show you shortly.

Making the pen more useful is Evernote, which comes preloaded. I know, preloading software that’s already free isn’t a big deal for the buyer, but this is a win for the folks at Evernote. Congrats to them.

Another useful bit of software is an application to use the built-in cameras. The HP Slate Camera application works with both the front-facing VGA webcam for video and the back-facing 3MP camera for stills and video. Seems like this should be an obvious piece of software to include, but most PC vendors still treat built-in cameras like hardware for you to use with other applications rather than features to use out of the box.

It also has an SD/SDHC/SDXC card slot, one USB port, and the dock connector for power and port expansion via the included dock. The dock adds two USB ports and HDMI. Stereo headset + microphone port is on both the slate and dock. Connectivity is via Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n. Starting weight is 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and packs 2-cell 30 Whr battery.

Price is $799 and that includes the HP Slate Digital Pen, HP Slate Dock, and HP Slate Portfolio. Official HP video from their Next Bench blog below. More video coverage coming soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX-B2wG1e4

Check out our other posts on the HP Slate 500 too!

27 Comments

27 Comments

  1. Rob

    10/22/2010 at 12:47 am

    Reports I am reading say the digitizer is wacom

  2. Rodfather

    10/22/2010 at 12:51 am

    Wow. The UMPC we always wanted.

  3. Josh Einstein

    10/22/2010 at 12:55 am

    Wow. My pants suddenly feel tighter. I want.

  4. lemel

    10/22/2010 at 1:09 am

    Wow, overall that was nice. I’ll admit, I didn’t have much faith in HP to deliver something great, but now I’ll pay attention. BUT, I have to say, when the doctor pinch zooms the hand x-ray near the start, it looks awful – not smooth at all – and this is a PR video, mind you.

    • GoodThings2Life

      10/22/2010 at 2:11 am

      Actually, those x-ray images are typically in a DICOM format and are generally very large files, so it’s not surprising to see some lag with those even on a full-power desktop system. It’s not something I’d show in a demo, but it is a reality.

      • lemel

        10/23/2010 at 1:14 am

        nYes, I understand the high resolution requirements of x-rays. This is an interface issue: The act of pinch-zooming should provide a fast preview of the action taking place, with a render command at the end (the target), not by rendering all the possible inbetween resolutions *during* the pinch. That would create lag on any image at any size. (On pinch unzoom, the windowing expands, so there would be a lag on getting cached parts of the image not already being displayed). At best, the application is to blame. At worst, the touch interface. Who knows – at this point I’m just glad the device is out there. I’ll wait for owner reviews, then hopefully sign up and finally retire my 2006 motion tablet.

  5. Fernando

    10/22/2010 at 1:30 am

    What do you think the battery life would be on this? Is the 30 Whr battery removable?

  6. GoodThings2Life

    10/22/2010 at 1:34 am

    B-E-A-utiful! :) That is the best news I’ve read on the new PC front in a while! :D

    • GoodThings2Life

      10/22/2010 at 2:06 am

      Oh, and by the way, I can see all the Apple fanboys ranting against the price, but this is a huge drop from the typical Windows tablets we see, and yet this tablet already has better specs than the iPad, so I’m perfectly OK with it.

  7. Infrequent poster

    10/22/2010 at 3:31 am

    Lag on the X-ray. Those that have never looked at a digital X-ray would never know that the resolution has to be much higher than say on this website.

  8. Kenrick Mock

    10/22/2010 at 4:16 am

    Looks pretty nice… the HP Slate or the Fujitsu T580? I think I’d go for the Fuji if the battery life is realistically > 6 hours.

  9. zzzxtreme

    10/22/2010 at 9:43 am

    Good news. But I’m gonna wait till January for cheaper offerings from Toshiba/Asus

  10. quillaja

    10/22/2010 at 12:03 pm

    This looks nice. If only this was available 3 years ago when I bought my first and, for the immediate future, last tablet PC. I felt really disappointed by the tablet PC (specifically mine since it has major build quality issues), and now I just don’t have any use for the tablet functionality.

  11. dstrauss

    10/22/2010 at 1:57 pm

    Mine’s on order now – shipping estimate is 11/12! Sorry to be stoked, but like other here I’ve been waiting since January, including a three month stint with an iPad which was sent to eBay heaven 3 weeks ago. On the price issue, I see the Apple fans are already going nuts, BUT, does the $699 iPad come with a full function docking station (including video out), custom folio, and pen? I’m really excited about that docking station. The early demos here and elsewhere look great. Battery life and slick media will be trumped by iPad, but after struggling to shoehorn the iPad into the enterprise environment, this is going to be a picnic. Sluggish or not, here we go.

  12. Anonymous

    10/22/2010 at 4:18 pm

    I ordered mine too. I would have preferred a Wacom digitizer since I have the Cross Executive Digitizer pen which I assume won’t work with the n-Trig but this is still light years ahead of any other tablet.

    For the commenter who mentioned the Fujitsu T580, I’ve used a similar sized Motion (without the keyboard) and I found that three pounds (versus the Slate’s pound and a half) is just too heavy for me when I don’t have a table handy. For the one that mentioned Toshiba/Asus offerings, those that I’ve heard about are all going to be touch only like the capacitive Toshiba W100/W105 or resistive Asus T91MT (which I also own). Given the choice between touch and the next generation Intel versus an active digitizer and this generation Intel, I’ve put my money down on the stylus.

    If you are interested in this, since I’ve already got my order in the queue I’ll give you the secret. Go to the HP Small and Medium Business site (it’s not available in the Home and Home Office site). Select “Laptops” and then “Mini” (it doesn’t show up in search). The current expected shipping date is 11/12.

    • Anonymous

      10/22/2010 at 4:30 pm

      Yep. Wacom and N-Trig are not cross-compatible. One of the reasons we keep trying to pry that info out of vendors.

    • Anonymous

      11/01/2010 at 5:21 pm

      Where did you find the Cross Digitizer? I’ve still got an HP2730p to nurse around and would kill for one of those!

  13. Tuur

    10/22/2010 at 6:10 pm

  14. Ignatius84

    10/22/2010 at 7:07 pm

    Windows 7 Slate Pcs need customized applications. Here is one example of that, StNotepad Touch with multi-touch gestures for all text editing actions like cut, copy, paste, delete, space, backspace, enter, tab, undo, redo, selectall etc… This will be helpful for editing text without traditional keyboard and mouse. For more information visit https://stforms.net/stnotepad-touch/

  15. Motmaitre

    10/22/2010 at 11:28 pm

    A dream come true. Kudos to HP for ignoring all the tech blog haters.

  16. Bishop

    10/29/2010 at 1:33 am

    I’m back. Been waiting on a new slate. I’ve ordered.

  17. thewerewolf

    11/08/2010 at 7:26 pm

    I have one huge concern… and I’m surprised no one’s commented on this.

    There’s no power port on the slate OR on the dock – you have to use the proprietary cable. And if you look at the cable, it looks like it’s hard wired to the power supply… which means – no outboard batteries. Since the battery is sealed (not user replacable) this is going to be a problem.

    I should have mine on the 18th and if this is how it is, I’m going to add a power port to the dock, or mod the cable to make it friendlier to other powersupplies and external batteries.

  18. Streaming UHD

    04/02/2015 at 5:35 am

    Hi there mates, its enormous paragraph about
    tutoringand fully explained, keep it up all the time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.