The bumpy saga of the HP Slate took another turn this week with the revelation that the product is still destined to launch with Windows 7, albeit with a focus on the enterprise market.

Frankly, the entire idea behind the Windows-based HP Slate seemed odd. HP wanted to take an operating system that is not particularly well-suited for the tablet form factor and cram it on a $1,500 touchscreen device with hardware specs that otherwise match the average $300 netbook. The previous plan to ditch the product seemed practically like a mercy killing, because the Windows-based Slate was an obvious non-starter for the regular consumer market.

But now HP says that it has tapped Windows for the enterprise tablet market. Engadget quotes HP Personal Systems Group VP Todd Bradley, who said that the Slate will be "more customer-specific than broadly deployed." We wondered at first what HP's product developers could be thinking, but the advantages of a Windows-powered Slate for the enterprise market start to look logical if you think about all of the highly specialized line-of-business software that only runs on Microsoft's operating system. However, many of these LOB applications are run only on-premises, which means that a slate running a simple remote desktop application will work just fine.

Ultimately, it looks like HP is going to pursue a two-platform strategy, using Windows for business products and webOS for the regular consumer market. I can imagine a Windows-based Slate gaining some momentum in the healthcare industry, where the client-side IT ecosystem is very Windows-centric and there is an obvious need for portable computing. But hospitals are also ideal examples of locations where a terminal server and a thin client can effectively bring Windows to ARM tablets. There are other businesses with similar needs where the technology may also be practical.

A two-platform strategy can be made viable, but I think that it would be stronger if they can provide some kind of portability layer for writing touchscreen applications that work across both operating systems. Perhaps this could be achieved by building some kind of webOS runtime for Windows, one that makes it easy to package up webOS HTML and JavaScript apps for deployment on Microsoft's operating system. Such an approach could boost the availability of tablet-friendly general-purpose applications that can be used alongside native Windows line-of-business software on the Windows-based Slate.

Maintaining and supporting multiple platforms in parallel can be difficult, so it's not surprising that HP decided to put aside its Android plans while it gets mobile products with Windows and webOS ready for the market. If webOS tablets succeed, I think it's unlikely that HP will continue tinkering with Android.

The real question at this point is whether we will see another dramatic reversal before the Slate hits the market. The product seems almost like the Schroedinger's Cat of tablets.

source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/hps-windows-7-slate-is-not-dead-yet.ars