Leaked HP Slate Gets Tepid Hands-On Response

A Mexican site called Conecti.ca got some hands-on time with the HP Slate and walked away decidedly unimpressed. The verdict: that the device is basically a keyboardless netbook. Well… yeah.

If nothing else, the mini-review confirms the leaked specs we saw a few weeks ago: the HP Slate runs full Windows 7 on an Atom processor, has oodles of ports, front and rear-facing cameras and a multitouch display. The main complaint over at Conecti.ca, in fact, seems to be the Slate’s “long and annoying load time”, which is a (unquantified) trade-off you would expect for being able to run a full notebook OS on a tablet. It seems more like a compromise than a straight-up drawback, especially when you consider that this was a prototype and likely not a production-level unit.

While Conecti.ca’s verdict is “meh”, it doesn’t seem to be based on a lot of new information. We do have a better sense of what the HP Slate looks like now, though. And hopefully soon we’ll pair that with a better look at how it runs. But for now, it’s too early to start dismissing its chances against the iPad and its upcoming wave of challengers. [Conecti.ca via PC World]