At the beginning of the year, HP's Slate 500 was the talk of the town and Windows 7 still looked like it could be the tablet OS of choice. Fast-forward eight months, and Intel-powered Windows devices are all but a distant memory, having been almost totally eclipsed by ARM, Android and Apple.
The world's largest PC manufacturer hasn't forgotten about the Slate, though, and the enterprise-only tablet has now shown up in a mini-review on YouTube.
The unidentified poster - going by the screen name x313xkillax - briefly walks through the hardware before booting the device. There aren't too many surprises on the outside, with the 8.9in prototype featuring a rubberised back, two integrated cameras, an SD-card slot, ‘keyboard button', USB port, volume buttons and a dedicated control-alt-delete key.
The system then gets powered on, and boots to a usable desktop relatively quickly. Navigating through the OS, the poster pulls up a browser and visits a few webpages - though at this point the experience starts to fall apart a little.
The interface was largely unaltered, making navigating with a relatively-inaccurate finger a clumsy experience that resulted in several 'missed' clicks. The screen also seemed a little unresponsive and failed to register some swipes, though this is to be expected for a device still in development.
Many commenters suggested that the Slate might be a fake, citing the inclusion of a Ctrl-Alt-Del key and the lack of an explanation as to the prototype's origin as reasons. However, the device certainly looks polished enough to be legitimate and seems to match up with earlier videos and photos.
For now, we'll leave it to you to pass judgement - on both the legitimacy of the device and the viability of Windows 7 as a tablet OS - in the HEXUS.community.
