Our TechTarget colleague Jamison Cush — editor at TechnologyGuide.com — got his hands on the new Hewlett-Packard Slate 500 tablet. It runs Windows 7 Professional and is aimed at business while keeping one eye on health care, he tells us.
The high points:
- The Slate isn’t a consumer device; it won’t be sold at Best Buy.
- It is thicker, but more rugged than the iPad.
- Its OS supports much more sophisticated multitasking out of the box than iOS or Android tablets can — or in some cases, will sometime in the future.
The Slate might not be an iPad killer, but Steve Jobs and Apple have tilted at Microsoft many times in the last three decades, and like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown over and over as he’s about to practice his kickoffs, Microsoft tends to get the last laugh (even though it’s let Apple lead the way in design and speed to market). But that was earlier in this war. Lately, with the iPod and iPhone (versus the Zune and whatever that smartphone was called that Microsoft released and killed before most of us knew it was out), Apple’s crushed its longtime nemesis.
Still, some health care IT leaders probably have been pining for a Windows-based tablet to integrate into their Windows shops. It might not have the look, feel and physician mind share of the iPad, but the Slate just might be the ticket. Certainly this tablet will get a lot of looks in hospitals as they roll out electronic health record systems, tune them up for meaningful use and try many devices en route to getting physician buy-in.
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