HP last night posted a (rather boring) five-minute video (even the interviewer seems to forget where she is at some points) giving further details about the HP Slate that Steve Ballmer showed off during his keynote at CES 2010. It was first posted on the hpcomputers YouTube channel with the heading "SPECIAL REPORT! The HP Slate." The interviewee is CTO Phil McKinney, who we've seen showing prototypes of HP touch devices before. We've watched the video so that you don't have to (despite its lacking presentation, the details are interesting), but in case you're interested, we've also embedded it below:
The project started five years ago at HP Labs in the UK, germinated by the concept of an e-reader device. HP took its prototypes and put it in the hands of users to get feedback from them. The biggest feedback users gave was that reading was great but they wanted it to do media as well, according to McKinney. As such, HP now believes that consumers are looking for a device that can be used as their "ultimate content consumption experience," McKinney says. It has to be thin and light, somewhere between 4 to 10 inches, and essentially invade the market that is currently dominated by e-readers from Sony and Amazon. Those devices don't have color though, nor can you play back videos, or browse the Internet on them, but McKinney says users want all that in addition to being able to read magazines and books, and that's the problem the slate platform will solve.
When asked, "why now?," McKinney answers that 2010 is "the optimal year for the slate platforms" because now there's "the perfect storm of innovation." There's a convergence of low-cost and low-power processors as well as the touch-aware Windows 7, and that's what will let HP push the slate platform.
"In reality we could have built this device two years ago. We had it ready; we put it on the shelf," McKinney boasts. "[At] that time for us to deliver the device it would have been $1,500, and [it] would have been outrageously expensive. Our target was to get it down to be a mainstream price point, mainstream product, not a niche offering."
So to sum up: you'll be able to get it some time in 2010, it will cost you less than $1,500, and it will run Windows 7.
