HP's Windows-based tablet may live despite Palm purchase

After HP completed its Palm acquisition earlier this month, everyone pretty much assumed the company would drop its plans of a Windows 7 equipped tablet and focus on webOS instead. Well, that may not be the case after all. A listing for the HP Slate 500 appeared yesterday on the company's site, depicting a device similar to the prototype shown at CES 2010, and now the PC manufacturer has officially confirmed this morning that the product is still very much in the works.

While not committing to an actual commercial release, a spokesperson from HP's Personal Systems group did say that they're "in customer evaluations now and will make a determination soon on the next steps." According to the product summary on its website, the device includes an 8.9-inch touch screen, runs on Windows 7 Premium, accepts pen and touch input, and has two cameras -- video and still. Additionally, a separate listing posted by Energy Star says the Slate has a 1.6GHz processor and 1GB of memory.


HP has said it wants to put webOS in tablets, and was recently granted a trademark for the term "PalmPad". It seems the company may ultimately release two devices, one running Windows and the other webOS. Given that the first is expected to have a full blown desktop OS and pen-input capabilities, some suggest it will be targeted at business users, while entertainment-focused consumers might be more interested in a platform that's actually built for mobile devices.