HP Slate vs. Apple iPad

Today we have some truly amazing products on the market. Some belong to the same family, and some just have nothing to compare them with. The Apple iPad and the Hewlett-Packard Slate PC are two rivals that have recently entered the market (the slate has not released yet). They both belong to the new age family of Tablet PCs, and both have some pretty amazing features to offer.

There are many points of comparison between the iPad and the Slate, and this is especially for people who can’t tell the difference between the two. To start with, Apple enjoys the fact that they’ve been in the ‘handheld device’ market for years now. Starting with their iPod and now the iPhone, people are familiar with their products and interfaces, and thus have a certain amount of trust in them, even before they purchase a product. The HP Slate however is a brand new entrant from HP, as they haven’t really been prominent in the handheld device market before this. Still, this is no reason to completely void the Slate as an option. As far as the interfaces are concerned, Apple has very well honed it’s Mac OSX version running on the iPod touch and the iPhone, and has successfully ported the same concept to the iPad, which seems to work flawlessly. The HP Slate however is running Windows 7, which is not originally a touch interface operating system. Apple has developed its own 1GHz A4 chipset processor that powers the iPad. This manages to deliver great graphics and processing speeds. The HP Slate on the other hand runs on the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Core 2 processor. The iPad still seems to take the lead here. The slate sports a 10 inch screen while the iPad has a 9.7 inch screen, though this difference is almost negligible. As far as web support is concerned, HP has integrated Adobe Flash content into the Slate’s browser capabilities, while the iPad seems to work fine without it. The iPad however does not possess a webcam, which the Slate does and this could give the Slate an upper hand when it comes to online communication. Both devices feature great onscreen keyboards; however Apple has integrated a dock for an external keyboard as well. Coming to multitasking, the Slate takes the win, as Apple’s OS doesn’t allow for instance; listening to music while running another application. The iPad would support only Safari (Apple’s browser) where as the Slate would support most browsers. Third party applications seem to be very well accepted by the iPad, although we know little about third party application support on the side of the slate.

The iPad starts at USD 499 and the HP Slate starts at USD 549. With the features discussed above, one should better be able to judge which device would suit oneself the best. The iPad has already sold millions of units worldwide, so lets hope that HP can catch up quick as well. Both these devices have a lot to offer.