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."
Re:HP? (Score:4, Interesting)
I shouldn't bother to feed the trolls, but I wouldn't count HP out just yet. At least not until we find out how their memristors turn out.
Re:Stockpile? (Score:4, Interesting)
It appears HP still had committments with suppliers to purchase parts - so there was one final production run as it was likely more profitable to build the parts into firesale TouchPads than to just write them off.
crosses fingers (Score:5, Interesting)
....for the next HP sell-off, after which someone jailbreaks the product and makes it actually useful.
Re:Bust (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
More powerful x86 slates that you can dock to use all existing PC apps but still use Metro apps on the go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-K1ELv6DE [youtube.com]
Of course these will probably be bigger and heavier (and more expensive) than Win 8 ARM tablets or an iPad, but Microsoft and their OEMs think there is a market for them.