Flash dance
How do you compete with an Apple launch? It seems inevitable that Apple will always generate more hype than anyone else so it's futile to go toe-to-toe with it on a launch. However, if you leave it too long you could end up not competing at all.
This is the dilemma facing HP, which has decided to be a lot more proactive in the nascent slate (keyboard-less, touchscreen notebook) category than it ever was with netbooks. The HP slate was first teased at CES by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but there has been little noise from HP since then.
That's probably wise as most of the interest around the slate form factor will be focused on the iPad until its launch in April. We reckon the iPad will do a lot to seed the slate market for everyone else and HP will be hoping to position its slate as delivering on all the areas in which the iPad is deficient.
Probably the biggest one of these is support for Adobe Flash. Steve Jobs appears to have issues with Adobe and the default application for watching video and animation on the web will not be supported by the iPad's operating system.
HP seems to be hoping this will be its Achilles Heel, and for some reason chose the Voodoo blog to bring attention to a recently published a video of its slate running Adobe Flash and Air. It appears to be running Windows 7, which will mean an Intel Atom CPU. We're not sure what the browser is, but the bookmark icon looks a bit Google-ish.
Here's also what appears to be some kind of ad, which is suspiciously reminiscent of Apple's first iPad ad.
