Supposed HP Slate prototype video (via John Gruber)
Some standouts:
- The Ctrl-Alt-Delete hardware button.1
- The booting.
- The mouse pointer that appears on screen for a few seconds after the desktop loads, tracking the first couple of touches, before some component presumably loads and tells it to hide. The touch features are obviously just sloppy bolt-ons to Windows.
- The little blue dot animation on each touch to give some feedback that it received the touch, presumably because so many applications in Windows aren’t meant to show any sort of touch feedback, because they’re not designed for touch usage. Sounds like a blast.
- The browser scrolling performance right before he says, “Very fast.”
- Flash running in the browser… otherwise it might be responsive.
- Tapping the address bar in Internet Explorer to type a URL doesn’t bring up the on-screen keyboard automatically, or hide it after the URL is entered — he has to hit the keyboard button on the side to show and hide the keyboard manually.
It’s a Windows 7 version of the same old Microsoft Tablet PC form factor, but this time, with a finger instead of a stylus. They used to call these “slate”-type Tablet PCs. They were slaughtered in the market by the “convertible” type that had the flip-around laptop keyboards, because most Windows software simply works much better with a keyboard and trackpad.
This is what happens when a PC hardware company tries to copy an Apple product’s feature checklist without getting it.
I hope that, somehow, this is fake. But I bet it isn’t.
This is comical, but the actual likely intention is less fun than killing hung apps: it’s probably to get through the Windows NT-style “Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on” screen, a relic from 1993, which is necessary on tablets presumably because Microsoft’s internal structure, politics, and fragmentation precluded the Tablet PC team from getting the Windows Account Security Or Whatever team to make an exception to this procedure for this edition of Windows 7. ↩
(via marco)
