I'm not just frustrated because I don't yet have my Slate 500. I'm even more frustrated because I don't have the slightest idea when I'll get it. The HP order page for my order is completely useless, continuing its pattern of updating the delivery date one day per day, always saying today's date.

There seems to be a lot of excitement out there for this fundamental form factor. Several major companies are talking about releasing tablets of various sizes and characteristics. What they all seem to have in common, though, is that they run upgraded phone operating systems. Android seems to be a popular choice. The iPad runs the same fundamental OS as the iPhone. And the buzz about HP is that their main choice for this would be WebOS, the lineal descendant of the Palm OS which they gained when they bought out Palm.

I don't understand that. I have owned PDA's before. I used to own a clamshell I bought from HP, which ran WinCE but used some sort of esoteric processor, and I have two main memories of it: first, that it was awesome and the built-in software worked really well (including a cut-down version of Office) and second, that finding apps for it was frustrating as all hell. They had to be developed specifically for WinCE and they had to be compiled for the specific Toshiba processor I was using. (Fortunately for me, the built-in apps were sufficient for my needs.)

That unit was amazing; it fit easily in my pocket, but when opened the top part featured a 640*200 display with a touch screen, and the bottom part had a mini-QWERTY keyboard. With my big fingers I couldn't touch-type, but I could four-finger quite reasonably.

One of the biggest reasons I was so hyped by the Slate 500 is because it runs Windows 7. Maybe it's not the best operating system in the world. Maybe making it run on that form factor is a problem. But, there's all that wonderful software out there which runs on it, including all the standard apps which I use on all my other Windows machines. And for me, at least, that easy and rich availability of apps is the biggest point in its favor.

I don't want Android. Maybe it's cooler than next week's snow storm. Maybe it's hotter than AGW. But it's still a custom execution environment, and I've already been there.

In fact I've been there as recently as last February. The iPaq is another one, and it took me a long time to figure out where and how to buy apps, and there just aren't that many out there that interest me. (I ended up buying about five games, but the only ones I ever play are an iPaq version of Minesweeper and an iPaq version of Mah Jong solitaire.)

Compatibility with Windows is a huge selling point for me, but apparently HP thinks it's a net negative. One reason they may have ordered a small initial production run for the Slate 500 (rumored) is that they really didn't want to release it with Windows, and wanted to wait until they could release fundamentally the same hardware but with WebOS on it. Bleah. (Yeah, they have to pay per-copy for Windows and WebOS they own, but that's their problem, not mine.)

The proprietary execution environment, combined with Apple's iron grip on app sales, is the main reason I would never consider buying an iPad. Android is a little better, because there's no Android equivalent to Apple's monopoly online store, but it's still a proprietary execution environment, a new one, with little support.

Windows solves that problem, but I seem to be the only person who thinks it's important.

It sure doesn't seem like HP does, though. They say that a sure sign that a studio thinks a movie is awful is that they don't schedule prescreenings of the film for big name reviewers. In the tech industry, a good indication that a company isn't enthusiastic about a high tech consumer product is that they don't release any to major tech magazines for review -- and that seems to be the case for the Slate 500. The only tech reviewer that I've found talking about seeing and trying a real unit was this one.

But it wasn't HP that let him use it. It was the Israeli company that developed the touch pad, and the unit he saw was an engineering proto, not even pilot build. The touch pad, apparently, is a step ahead: it can detect multi-touch, and it is pressure sensitive. So that company is proud of the unit and wants the press to see it.

Unlike HP.

One of the rumors was that shipment was shut down because they had discovered a major bug which could cause the unit to lock up completely, requiring a reset. If so, then maybe the reason they haven't loaned any units to any reviewers is because they feared the result if the units did lock up that way. And I can't really blame them.

If it's an intransigent bug, finding and fixing it could really be  time-consuming. I know that all too well, from personal experience. But I also know that leaving customers (and potential customers) dangling in the breeze, with no solid information at all, is terrible business practice.

Maybe they're working their butts off to try to ship these as soon as they reasonably can. Or maybe they just don't give a damn.

The "back order" announcement doesn't explain everything. If, as the rumor said, they built 5000 units and received 9000 orders, well, then there should be 5000 happy customers out there who received theirs -- or a hundred, or at least a few. A handful of the 5000 units should have ended up with magazines for review.

The fact that, as far as I can tell, not a single unit has shipped, means there's something deeper going on, which is why I'm coming to believe the "last minute fatal bug" explanation. If anyone out there has received their Slate 500, they haven't posted anything about it online that I've found using major search engines.

It's increasingly hard for me to ignore the "they don't give a damn" theory. (Which isn't mutually exclusive with the "fatal bug" theory.)

No matter what the issues are, HP's utter silence regarding the situation is intolerable.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 08:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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