The Tablet PC Market has seen quite a lot of news as of late, the release of the iPad getting the most of it. With five more tablets on the verge of launching, photographers who may want to invest in one may be wondering which tablet is the right tablet for them. Over the next 5 days I’m going to take a look at these tablets and try my hand at deciphering which tablet would be a good tablet for photographers. The first being the HP Slate.
The HP Slate is collaboration between Microsoft and Hewlett Packard and is supposed to be the main rival to the Apple iPad. While the prototypes look sleek, there is a lot of speculation as to whether it will be a success or not. However, lets not judge a book by its cover and see what kind of guts this thing has.
The Slate is going to run a full Windows 7 Operating System on it. This means that you will get all the functionality of a regular computer, which is what HP & Microsoft were shooting for. The Slate has multitasking, word processing, internet, flash, any web browser, and can do everything a PC can. Since Windows 7 is already touch enabled this allows for a lot of mobility. The real question is, “Does this come with a price?” The reason why I ask that is because for our means here at The Phoblographer and any other photographer this tablet needs to keep up with high demanding photo editing software such as Photoshop.
This brings me to the next point which is the processor of the tablet. While no processor has been confirmed just yet, it is rumored to run something along the lines of an Intel M processor, which means it will be faster than the iPad supposedly. One thing I can’t help but wonder though is how such a processor will be able to handle such resource heavy software. The concern here is slowing the tablet down to a crawl which would not be so good. The other thing to take into consideration is the fact that Windows 7 was meant to work with a keyboard and mouse. Now the Tablet will have an onscreen keyboard, I can’t help but wonder though how people will perform certain actions that require a right click. I am assuming that to do this one would long press the screen.
There isn’t that much more out there as far as the HP Slate goes. It is “slated” to be released in mid 2010, so I am sure a lot more information will be made available as it comes closer to the time of release. I have to say though due to the little information we have on the product I can’t say much just yet. I also have not had any time with the product either so I really can’t say its going to be bad or good, but with the way things are going it may not be the best tablet for photographers and while that can change, for now I am going to leave it at a no.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the JooJoo Tablet.
Pingback: Tablets For Photographers: The HP Slate « The Phoblographer : HP Slate