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HP Confirms Slate To Run WebOS
Kilrah_il writes "After HP bought Palm a few weeks ago, many rumors emerged regarding the new parent company's plans to further expand the scope of devices running WebOS. Now it appears that at least one of the rumors is true: The Slate will be running WebOS. 'Today an HP exec has confirmed that the company is developing a WebOS tablet which should be available by October.'"
In terms of hardware, HP has(within the limitations imposed by Intel and physics) pretty much been-there-done-that in terms of Wintel Tablets. Their TC1100, with ULV Pentium M, up to 2BG of RAM, 802.11b/g, bluetooth, and fully detachable keyboard was among the high-water marks of the genre. The only difference from what you mention is that the screen was stylus based, both because capacitive displays of that size weren't really available yet, and because XP really requires fairly fine pointing precision, unless you are running at an annoying low resolution, or have managed to get everything working with a nonstandard DPI setting.
They also have their line of "touchsmart" desktops, which run full Windows, have finger-touch screens(in the 20-inch range), and some vendor shovelware designed to give you some touch stuff to do. They aren't bad, per se, you don't pay much of a premium over standard wintel all-in-ones, and the touch can be a fun gimmick, but you don't exactly see them sprouting on every desk. As far as I can tell, the trouble is that, as long as the number of Windows boxes without touch vastly exceeds the number with, "touch support" is going to be an afterthought. MS has done about as well as can be expected in natively rendering touch events into mouse activity, so using applications that don't care is certainly possible; but it isn't terribly pleasant. There aren't many applications that explicitly go beyond that(aside from a few that support some gestures or something, or esoteric warehouse management stuff, and other bespoke specialty things).
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people wanting Windows-based tablets. Given that building one will basically involve chopping the keyboard off a netbook and springing for a more expensive display, I'm sure that they'll get their wish. However, Windows-based tablets have been tried, off and on, for ages(Windows 3.1 had a Pen-computing add-on) and it has just never worked that well, outside of niche situations with a limited set of bespoke applications(at which point, unless your volume is tiny, you could probably get a ruggedized CE device with 4 times the battery life to do the job).