HP Officially Announces the Slate 500

[Steve S]

HP has officially announced their Slate 500. The device will be aimed primarily at business users and sold through HP's Enterprise site. At the moment, there is only one model (SKU) with a $799 price. It seems likely that other models will eventually be available, probably next year. Several sites are running informative videos, including www.GottaBeMobile.com and, of course, Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/21/h...ngs-up-at-799/

The Slate 500 features an N-trig capacitive touch digitizer along with N-trig's Digital Pencil for true pen plus touch capability. The slate uses 2nd-generation N-trig digital components. (Note that in recent times, N-trig has fixed many of the issues that so incited users of their first gen hardware, i.e., the Dell XT and the HP tx2. N-trig's current software (3.118) is really quite good on the XT.)

[digitaldoctors]

haha.
I was just about to post this !

[digitaldoctors]

HP Slate 500
1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540 processor,
2GB of RAM,
64GB SSD
Broadcom's Crystal HD accelerator for handling 1080p video.
8.9-inch capacitive touch Slate
Windows 7 Professional
N-trig active digitizer
1.5 lbs.
1024 x600
$799.
USB port, headphone jacks, keyboard button and that always useful Alt + Ctrl + Delete key.

I'd love to play with this and see how the inking is.

[digitaldoctors]

I think Battery Life will be an issue.

[Steve S]

Again, the digitizer is N-trig, not Wacom...

Battery life is said to be about 5 hours.

[Steve S]

Some videos (see the two user videos posted by Xavier Lanier at GottaBeMobile) are starting to show what looks to be either little palm rejection capability on the Slate 500 or "palm rejection lite." Hopefully, this will be clarified in the near future as more people report their impressions (per Xavier, the units that he toyed with were prototypes; one presumes that production units would show some improvements in overall operating behavior).

However, palm rejection doesn't come for free; it requires additional processing power somewhere within the hardware architecture, and the HP designers may be walking a thin line between limited processing power (that Adam processor) and the desire for long battery operating life (more computing means shorter operating time). If the palm rejection capabilities are limited, and we won't know that for sure until we see production units, then it may be a compromise that HP was forced to make.

It will be interesting to see if the Fujitsu T-580, which is in the same screen size class and also has a full 2nd-gen N-trig digitizer, but features an i5 processor, has similar palm rejection issues, or not....

[Steve S]

Word on the street is that the Slate 500 does have palm rejection.

[docg]

Looks really nice! With that added palm rejection it could be a next device Now all I have to do is wait 3 years for a used unit! LOL

[tromply77]

So, I've got the Tc1100 with the 1.2 GHZ processor. Does this new Hp Slate have a better processor? I don't know hardly anything about the Atom processors...
All I do know is the one thing my wonderful computer lacks is HD video. If I could edit my HD home videos, I'd be in heaven.

[Steve S]

<<...I don't know...anything about the Atom processors...>>

trom: Did a quick search, couldn't find any exact matches, but the Atom has a benchmark score around ~700 whereas on the same benchmark the i5 comes in at about ~1100. (For example, the new Fujitsu T-580 features an i5.) So pretty significant difference if all you are comparing in the system is the CPU. In reality, it's not quite that simple. In many real-world computers, the hard drive is the performance bottleneck, not the CPU. The amount of available RAM is another very significant factors...

See:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/low_end_cpus.html

and

http://cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html


I didn't have time to hunt through these tables very thoroughly, but they do give you the general idea...