What's going on with the HP Slate?
Interesting post by our friend Harry McCracken at Technologizer today, pointing out that HP's gone dead silent about the Slate ever since it announced plans to acquire Palm. Harry was at The Big Money's Untethered conference today, and HP CTO Phil McKinney was on stage, where he "talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices" and "extolled the virtues of webOS." Interesting topic, since the Slate very prominently ran Windows 7. When pressed, Phil said he couldn't talk about unreleased products, which is a big change: it's been six months since Steve Ballmer first showed the Slate at CES, and since then HP's produced several rah-rah videos, one of them featuring none other than Phil McKinney himself.
Harry takes this new silence to mean that the HP Slate is dead, and we're beginning to think he's right: although we haven't heard anything concrete, we definitely noticed HP's absence at tablet-heavy Computex, and at this rate, the Slate's rumored 1.6GHz Atom Z530 will be hopelessly out of date by the time it launches -- Intel's now showing off Moorestown Atom Z600 tablets and it's got the Windows-tablet focused Oak Trail Atom planned for early next year. The window's closing a little more with every passing day -- at this point, HP needs to come clean just so we can all move on to waiting for the Hurricane.
