HP Slate 2: Brilliant or Bust? 235
First time accepted submitter redletterdave writes "After being introduced in September, HP's new CEO Meg Whitman announced Oct. 27 that the company 'needs to be in the tablet business.' However, by creating a lackluster product in the Slate 2 that runs on a soon-to-be-outdated operating system, HP will surely find itself back where it started, when furious Best Buy executives demanded HP to take back their thousands of unsold tablets piling up in storage."
Best Buy was returning TouchPads, not Slates (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the Slate has been selling pretty steadily since its announcement --- mostly to business, but Amazon is listing just 4 in stock at the moment.
More positive and informative article here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57317842-290/surprise-hps-slate-pc-is-a-success/ [cnet.com]
There aren't that many competitors in the Windows Tablet PC slate-format since Fujitsu quit. I really wish HP would revive the form-factor of the critically-acclaimed Compaq TC-1x00 though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Compaq_TC1100 [wikipedia.org]
which truly offered the best of all possible worlds.
William
Re:Bust (Score:1, Informative)
the HP Slate 500 was meant for a target market for uses such as myself who need to be able to use stuff like cisco vpn that is not supported on android and use windows apps that are not available on apple. Considering nobody I've ever heard of has an apple based server environment, and vpn is the only way into the network, that leaves a shocking realization... if you can't see the benefits of win 7 on a tablet, then its not for you! It's for the IT crowd who are too cool for laptops, or in my case corporate bought it, why would I say no?
Now why would I ever use my single core tablet over my m15x? Portability, but I don't own say the m11, where that would make it a tough choice for me on what to carry. Personally I wouldn't even consider it, professionally it makes a lot of sense. And even though win 7 is lame on a touchscreen, the whole concept / idea is pretty cool and you can always connect a bluetooth keyboard and mouse into it. It does everything ipad and android based tablets do, in some cases not as good, but it DOES stuff neither one of the aforementioned does, such as run mmc, if you don't know what mmc is, refer to first paragraph.
Re:Bust (Score:4, Informative)
Windows 8 will run everything Windows 7 and before would run.
No it won't. An ARM tablet won't run anything from Windows 7 other than the few .Net applications which don't call native code other than that provided by Microsoft.
And any of those applications which do run will leave you with a WIMP interface on a crappy touchscreen. Microsoft have been pushing that for at least a decade and it's been a dismal failure.
So again, what does a Windows 8 tablet offer that an iPad or an Android tablet don't?
Re:Loss Leaders (Score:2, Informative)
It's been shown in Apples own quarterly reports that they are NOT losing money on iPad sales. They are making a very nice profit.