The price comes via the Spanish Clipset site, so isn't confirmed or anything—though they are saying it'll support Flash, run on an Atom chip and will have a USB port, memory card reader and webcam (albeit on the back.)

Launch details seem to suggest June, or "before September" for Europe. [Clipset via Engadget Spanish via Engadget]

When a quarterly report requires a heads-up, like this one does, the news can't be great. And it wasn't. Palm lost $22m last quarter, which isn't huge money for a company with revenues of a few hundred million, but is pretty serious for a company that's still in recovery mode. They shipped 960,000 phones this quarter (again, OK), but only about 400,000 of them actually sold to customers—30% less than last quarter.

CEO Jon Rubinstein's stickin' strong:

Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong. The work we're doing to improve sales is having an impact, we're making great progress on future products, and we're looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable - and growing - advantage as we move forward.

And he's right: webOS is the most valuable thing they have—in a buyout scenario. Of course, he wouldn't discuss the prospect of a buyout during today's earnings call, at all.

Palm's running out of options as Palm. And the possibility of a buyout isn't just a tech world fantasy, or armchair economic analysis: Apparently, the few Wall Street analysts who've stuck with Palm through the last six months are starting to bail, and the last remaining holdouts are literally banking on a buyer to save the day.

A Palm buyout could mean a lot of things, from a transparent absorption into a company that needs a cellphone presence (HP?) to an integration into an existing line (RIM?) to a full on cannibalization for intellectual property (Google?). The question now is less of an if than a when, and less of a when than a who. Place your bets in the comments. [Palm]

The brutal destruction of the HP laptop happened eight months ago, but it's only just now come to light thanks to 170 formal complaints against HP products in China. I'm amazed at how chilled-out he looks, despite being angry enough to tear his laptop to pieces at a HP store. [Giz China]

A really odd sense of humor. [Engadget]

For our Battlemodo, we decided to look only at netbooks powered by Intel's Pine Trail (Atom N450) processor. Netbooks sporting older processors are a bit cheaper, but they're also a little slower and don't achieve the same impressive battery life as Pine Trail. And they've been reviewed to death elsewhere.

Netbooks with an Ion GPU are also available, but they've got their own baggage. First: they're around $50 more expensive than non-Ion models. Second: they're not available yet on Pine Trail. So you can either settle for an older processor with Ion and take a battery life and performance hit, or wait until the first Pine Trail-compatible netbook—the Acer Aspire One 532G—comes out later this year and pay the premium. Once you're spending $500+ on a netbook, though, you may as well step up to a full-function ultraportable.

So: Pine Trail netbooks it is. Usually we put the benchmarks off until the end, but in this case it's worth highlighting up front just how comparable these machines are inside:
Peas in an underwhelming pod. Which is why when you're even considering a netbook, it's vital to pay outsized attention to design, display, keyboard, and all the extras that'll ultimately inform your experience.

The Results

I'll say this as many times as I have to: netbooks are a sea of sameness. And it's a shame that even the ones that stand out come with some significant caveats.

The Winner (If You Need Affordable HD Now)

Dell Inspiron Mini 10

Price: $425

The Dell Mini 10 is a little bulkier than the other contenders, but I'm happy to trade a little weight for the sturdier build. The glossy red top was a welcome splash of color without looking cheap. And where most netbook batteries stick out the back end or bottom like oblong tumors, the Mini's is safely tucked away in the bottom deck. The result? A small form laptop with a big boy design. The Mini 10 was also the easiest to type on, with flush and raised keys leaving me pleasantly hand-cramp-free compared to the island-style netbook keyboards.

Most importantly, Dell (along with HP) has managed to mitigate the netbook HD problem by throwing Broadcom's Crystal HD accelerator into the mix. It won't offer the full 3D graphic support of Ion, and you'll have to download Adobe's Flash 10.1 beta 3 for the full effect, but once I did I was able to reliably stream 1080p video off of YouTube, as well as full-screen HD content from Hulu. it's your best bet until Pine Trail Ion 2 netbooks start popping up later this year.

Here's the catch: the trackpad is bad. Really, truly, frustratingly bad. Not so bad as to be unusable, but it's too small and the integrated buttons respond clumsily.

Runner Up: HP Mini 210 HD Edition
Price: $465

Admittedly, this was a close call. The HP Mini 210 has a similarly solid feel to it, and handles HD video almost as well as the Dell. But in the two areas that are arguably most critical to a netbook experience—battery life and price—the Mini came up way short. Unlike other manufacturers who include a 6-cell battery as standard, HP offers theirs as an $80 add-on, driving up the price of a usable configuration. Not that it did much good: the Mini 210 fared worst of all in our battery test, lasting only 4:09.

The Winner (If You Don't Care About HD)

Acer Aspire One 532h

Price: $350

If you don't consider watching HD clips on your netbook an integral part of the experience, congratulations! You're going to be able to save yourself a good chunk of cash and walk away with an otherwise comparable user experience. The Acer Aspire One 532h has a sleek design and performs at least on par with the Dell and HP in almost every other respect. It had the best battery life of the bunch, it's wafer-thin and extremely light, and has a raised trackpad that's actually enjoyable to use.

The main drawback to the Acer is its keyboard. Although I like the larger buttons, there's a certain amount of give in the middle that makes an otherwise crisp design feel cheap. The glossy top is also prone to smudging in a way that the other models manage to avoid. Otherwise, though, it performs as well as the extremely capable Toshiba NB305—for $50 less.

Runner Up: Toshiba NB305
Price: $400

The Toshiba stands out as being good at everything, but not great at anything. And if it were a bit cheaper, it'd be my pick here. But paying $400 for a computer with an Atom processor that doesn't play HD seems like a tough sell, especially when for just a few more bucks you can step up to the Dell.

Feature Comparison

Battery life was tested by running each laptop on moderate performance settings, three-quarters screen brightness, and refreshing a page in Firefox every thirty seconds to simulate active browsing.

Verdict: Buy What's Cheap

I wish there were a clear-cut winner. I wish Pine Trail had more to offer. I wish Sony weren't charging $480 for their incredibly subpar Vaio W Eco edition. But hey, that's just netbooks.

It's an interesting dilemma. There's clearly value in an affordable computer you can carry around for basic tasks, but is this really the best we can do? And the more triage we do on netbook guts to increase usability—be it Ion graphics or Broadcom HD accelerators—the more expensive they get, and the less apparent that value proposition becomes. And who knows? Maybe netbooks themselves have never been more than a patch. Maybe what we've really wanted all along are tablets and smartbooks.

For now, though: find the cheapest netbook you can that does what you need. If that means HD, go for the Dell. If not, the Acer's your pick, or even an older, discounted model, if you don't see yourself needing maxed-out battery life. It's purely a commodity purchase: treat it like one, and you'll be fine.

The Adobe clip shows real-use situations with Flash, and it looks great. The HP clip, though, is totally rendered: screen, hand, everything fake.

There could be lots of reasons for that, of course. But hopefully it's not that HP doesn't trust its Slate enough yet to film actual behavior.

Also making a debut appearance, in the first video: the Slate's on-screen keyboard, which doesn't seem to have solved any of the problems the iPad's poses.

Apple may have a head start with the iPad, but HP's clearly staking out their tablet territory by stressing Flash so heavily this early. Let's hope it plays as well in real life as it does in simulations. [Engadget]

The 12.1-inch WXGA (1280 x 800) LED display includes anti-glare and optional outdoor view, and can be operated with a pen, your finger, the keyboard, or some combination thereof. Under the hood, you've got your choice of Core i7 or Core i5 processors, but there's sadly no discrete graphics option.

You'll get up to five hours out of the standard six-cell battery, but can add on an HP 2700 ultra-slim battery for an additional six hours (listed). And the standard set-up weighs under four pounds—not bad for a tough guy convertible tablet. The HP EliteBook 2740p will be available in the US in April, starting at $1600.

Processor: Intel® CoreTM i7 Mobile Processor Family with Turbo Boost Technology; Intel® CoreTM i5 Mobile Processor Family with Turbo Boost Technology

Memory: DDR3 SDRAM, 1066/1333 MHz*, two slots supporting dual-channel memory, 1024/2048/4096 MB SODIMMs, up to 8192 MB total15 *Running at 1066 MHz

Removable Media: Optional HP External USB CD/DVD R/RW Drive Optional fixed 9.5-mm DVD+/—RW SuperMulti DL Drive available for HP 2740 Ultra-Slim Expansion Base9

Graphics: Intel® HD Graphics with dynamic frequency

Wireless Support: Optional HP un2420 EV-DO/HSPA Mobile Broadband Module (requires mobile network operator service)5 (GPS-enabled)6; Intel Centrino; Intel 802.11a/b/g/n;4 Broadcom 802.11a/b/g/n, b/g;4 HP Integrated Module with Bluetooth ® v2.1 Wireless Technology; HP Wireless Assistant, Connection Manager 3.1

Expansion Slots: 1 ExpressCard/34 slot, Secure Digital slot (SD/MMC)

Chipset: Mobile Intel QM57 Chipset; Intel vPro Technology24 (optional)

Internal Storage: 1.8-inch bay: 160/250 GB25 5400 rpm SMART SATA II HD, 320 GB25 5400 rpm HDD or 80/160 GB25 SSD, HP 3D DriveGuard

Display: 12.1-inch diagonal LED-backlit WXGA ultra wide viewing angle anti-glare (1280 x 800) – digitizer only or digitizer & multi-touch Optional Outdoor View, (Outdoor view only available with digitizer and multi-touch)

Audio/Visual: High Definition Audio, stereo speakers, combo headphone/microphone jack, integrated dual-microphone array, integrated 2 MP Webcam

Communications: Integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet PCI Controller (10/100/1000 NIC), 56K v.92 modem
Ports and Connectors: 3 USB 2.0 ports (one powered), VGA, combo headphone/microphone jack, 1394a, power connector, RJ-11/modem, RJ-45/Ethernet, docking connector for HP 2740 Ultra-Slim Expansion Base

Software: HP Recovery Manager (Windows 7 and Vista only), HP Support Assistant (Windows 7 and Vista only), Intervideo WinDVD (select models),

Security: Standard: HP ProtectTools, Integrated Smart Card Reader, HP Fingerprint Sensor, TPM Embedded Security Chip 1.2, Kensington Lock slot, Enhanced Pre-Boot Security, HP Spare Key (requires initial user setup), HP Disk Sanitizer19 Enhanced Drive Lock, Drive Encryption for HP ProtectTools, Credential Manager for HP ProtectTools, File Sanitizer for HP ProtectTools;19

Power: HP 6-cell (44 WHr) primary battery, HP Long Life 6-cell (39 WHr) primary battery, optional secondary HP 6-cell (46 WHr) 2700 Ultra-Slim

Warranty: Limited 3-year, 1-year and 90-day warranty options available, depending on country, 1-year limited warranty on primary battery; 3-year: limited warranty on HP Long Life Batteries10. Optional HP Care Pack Services are extended service contracts which go beyond your standard
warranties. For more details visit: http://www.hp.com/go/lookuptool.

Input Device: Full-sized spill-resistant keyboard with drains, dual pointing devices (touchpad with scroll zone, pointstick), digital eraser pen, Jog dial, 2 MP Webcam16, touch-sensitive controls, HP DuraKeys22
HP QuickLook 3,7 HP QuickWeb,8 Roxio Creator Business 10 (select models), HP Power Assistant,18 Skype,16 WinZip 12

Optional: LoJack for HP ProtectTools,2, 20 McAfee Security Solution26

Dimensions: 1.25in(atfront)x11.42inx8.35in /31.7mm(atfront)x290mmx212mm

Weight: Starting at 3.8 lb (1.72 kg) with no WWAN (weight will vary by configuration)
Battery, 65W Smart Combo Adapter,2 HP Fast Charge

Expansion Solutions:HP 2740 Ultra-Slim Expansion Base, HP USB 2.0 Docking Station, HP Essential USB 2.0 Port Replicator

[HP]

HP's rolling out four new ProBook models, ranging from the 13.3-inch 4320s to the heavy-duty 17.3-inch 4720s. In addition to those speedy Arrandale processors and "caviar" and "bordeaux" aluminum finishes, the new line-up also features optional ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4350 discrete graphics (compared with the previous generation's Radeon 4330, HD LED-backlit displays, and an optional 2MP camera.

The ProBooks also feature DayStarter, a feature that lets you view your calendar to distract you while your computer loads, and ArcSoft TotalMedia Suite audio and video editing software. WIth an optional 9-cell battery, the battery life is listed at an impressive 10 hours.

You won't find any USB 3.0 here, and the price points—starting at $719 for the 13-inch base configuration—are good-not-great. But if you need a work notebook with a little flair, and a home notebook with a little kick, ProBook might be your answer for both. You'll have a chance to find out when they become available later this month. [HP]

The implication of "longer than expected" is that success will come if everyone just waits long enough. But to say something like that in February of 2010, over seven months after the Pre launch, three after the Pixi launch, and weeks after a by all counts anemic launch for their barely differentiated Verizon counterparts is to tacitly admit that there's a serious problem. If Palm's current lineup doesn't have momentum now, it never will—and their investors know it.

For Palm, this leaves two options: either build a new product—something they may not be able or positioned to do—and hope it's a wild success; or sell out. So who's buying? BusinessInsider throws the regular suspects on the table—RIM, Nokia, Dell, HP—but they seem chosen because they'd be interesting buyers, not because they've shown any real interest. Hey, wouldn't it be neat if Nokia or BlackBerry absorbed webOS, so they could both have truly modern, user-friendly smartphone operating systems? Yeah it would! Someone should tell them.

This leaves Palm with nothing to do but wait: to die; or to be saved by a hero it hasn't even glimpsed yet, and that probably doesn't exist.

UPDATE: Here's Rubinstein's memo to Palm employees re: their lowered guidance for the year. It's far from defeatist, but even further from reassuring:

Team,

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We're scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

We'll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I'll be happy to answer your questions.

Go team!!!

jon

200 brand ambassadors and maybe some local advertising? That's more worrying than if Rubinstein had said nothing at all. [BusinessInsider]

There's not much more info on the V1020h's specs quite yet, but at $109 it's a good $30 cheaper than the least expensive pocketcams we tested in our most recent Battlemodo. It's purple and it's slated to hit shelves this summer. [Nexus404]

HP wants to come in under $630 for their full Windows 7 Slate. A tall order, considering that even Asus and MSI, skilled as they are in the art of undercutting, furrowed their collective brows at the iPad's cheaper-than-expected pricing.

And apparently Acer's already backtracking on their promise not to make iPad competitors, with Sumit Agnihotry, a marketing veep at Acer telling the WSJ that working on stuff in between a phone and laptop, and that "Acer plans to introduce possibly more iPad-like devices." Then there's Dell, who found via consumer research what they really want is a five-inch slate for browsing. So voila. Let's not forget JooJoo or Lenovo, either. And Super Kindle!

Oh, this is going to be a fucking mess. [WSJ]

Teaming with Adobe, Wired built this new rendition of their magazine (due this summer) through Air, which offers compatibility to both Android and Apple mobile platforms as well as Macs and PCs.

Well, sort of.

The catch, of course, is that while Wired Reader can be packaged into its own Air runtime app to load on the iPad, Apple doesn't have to allow it (for reasons of security, stability or, well, whatever grumpy reasoning Apple comes up with). Also, the demo you see here is seamlessly smooth, and this fluidity is a huge flavor component to this visual candy. Whether or not the content will be so jitter-less on either the iPad or any stock Android tablet is still an unknown (especially as some iPad animations tended to stutter during our hands on, without any Air go-between).

Those caveats aside, I do think Wired Reader looks fairly exciting. So which magazine do you prefer, the paper version or the tablet version? [Wired via Business Insider]

The sensor is part of HP's unfortunately named CeNSE (Central Nervous System for the Earth) program, whose aim is to build a "planetwide network" of tiny sensors to measure anything and everything about the environment. It's the first prototype in the CeNSE project, and it's safe to say they're starting off on the right foot:

Hartwell's device is sensitive enough to "feel" a heartbeat. The source of that sensitivity is a 5mm-square, three-layer silicon chip. A portion of the center wafer is suspended between the two outer wafers by flexible silicon beams. When the chip moves, the suspended center lags behind due to its inertia. A measurement of that relative motion is used to calculate the speed, direction and distance the chip has moved.

While the larger CeNSE project may have environmentalist overtones, the first practical application is going to be from oil behemoth Shell. They'd like to use the sensors to detect pockets of oil, allowing them to drill more efficiently. Eventually, HP hopes to move to "city-level" projects that digitally capture what the five senses do—and in some cases, what they can't. And when they finally stuff that sucker in a Wiimote, Super Smash Bros. will never be the same. [HP via Fast Company]

HP Spain—the only country when it would be released for now—says that it will last 12 hours per charge, with a 10-day standby time. It comes with a 16GB SSD, Wi-Fi, and 3G connection, which will be tied to the Telefónica network. [Slashgear]

That $600 base model has respectable specs, too: a 2.13GHz Core i3 processor, a 160GB hard drive, 3GB of DDR3 RAM, a 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) LED display, DVD burner, and three USB 2.0 ports. It's also upgradeable to a Core i5 or i7 CPU, a 500GB hard drive, and 4GB RAM. You can also tack on a Blu-ray player and a multi-format memory card reader.

There are a few downsides: an HDMI port doesn't come standard (but can be added on), and you're stuck with Intel's integrated graphics no matter what. But for $600, you could certainly do a lot worse. [HP via Slash Gear]

These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP's slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.

But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a "third" option, it's what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we've really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn't clear at all.

Making Phones Bigger

First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That's the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo's Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that's sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that's another story.)

So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.

When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It's a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you'd have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.

Also, because you're working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there's the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.

So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple's case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you'll have a better battery life than the alternative.

Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?

If you're building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn't have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you'd have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.

There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There's copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there's no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can't even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there's minimal interaction between applications. That's not saying it can't be done, it's just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don't do it very often. If the OS maker doesn't do it, developers won't either.

Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you're getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that's the only choice you have.

To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what's being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can't, and don't this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.

Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can't handle well. You're limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn't have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.

All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it's just a matter of wanting to put it in. There's no reason why these phone-based OSes can't accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It's just against the design philosophy.

But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can't be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you're looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you'd want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we're not seeing in these devices. I'm not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I'm talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.

That's right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android's tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they're on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won't do.

Shrinking PCs Down

Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There's the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you're doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)

What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You'll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you'll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:

There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.

HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn't a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice "tablet" interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don't. That's fine, better even, but it's not a coherent computing experience.

Since it's ultimately a desktop OS, it's not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft's making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They're offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.

Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach

Frankly, we're not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.

Everything we've seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there's a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it's just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.

We know more about the JooJoo. What's nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it's only for "video conferencing," if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.

What We Need Is a Third Approach

The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public's imagination for at least that long.

The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They're all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.

Surprisingly enough, it's Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that's perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.

If you watch the Courier video above, you'll notice that it's an entirely new class of interface. It doesn't have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn't have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It's kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.

Or take a look at this video. Again, it's neither phone nor desktop—it's designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We're looking for something completely new with an interface that "just works" for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don't want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.

It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft's taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it's unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.

If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don't have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we'll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.

Well, at least this new option makes you a viable (though a bit Pontiac-looking) replacement for an i7 iMac. Check out what I thought about the Core2Duo version of the TouchSmart 600 here. Then know that the i7 will be the exact same thing but faster. [HP]

Updated: We've added Lenovo IdeaPad U1 and Archos 9 Windows 7 edition—see below for more details.

Click on the image to view it larger

As you can see, they have different strengths and weaknesses, some of which will become more clear in the coming months as we learn more about each tablet. (That Dell Mini 5 is especially inscrutable right now.)

The iPad has the most storage, cheap 3G, the time-tested iPhone OS and its mountain of apps, and a serious amount of Apple marketing juice behind it. But it's also famously lacking features common to the other tablets, such as webcam and multitasking (only first party apps like music and email can multitask). The Notion Ink Adam is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, with its dual-function transflective screen from Pixel Qi: It can be either a normal LCD or, with the flick of a switch, an easy-on-the-eyes reflective LCD that resembles e-ink. Its hardware is also surprisingly impressive—but it remains to be seen if Android is really the right OS for a 10-inch tablet.

The Dell Mini 5 and forthcoming Android edition of the Archos 7 tablet are two of a kind, almost oversized smartphones in their feature sets. Is an extra two or three inches of screen real estate worth the consequent decrease in pocketability? Perhaps not. And finally, there's the maligned JooJoo, formerly the CrunchPad, a bit of an oddball as the only web-only device in the bunch. It doesn't really have apps, can't multitask, and pretty much confines you to an albeit fancy browser, sort of like Chrome OS will. The JooJoo is also the only tablet here to have no demonstrated way to read ebooks.

Update: The two new additions in v.2 of this chart, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 and Archos 9, are both unusual. The Windows 7-powered Archos 9 has been available since September, is the only slate here that lacks multitouch, and is the only one with a HDD instead of solid state memory of some kind. It's more related to the older tablets, but there's no keyboard, just a 9-inch touchscreen. It doesn't even have specific apps like the HP Slate's TouchSmart, it's just a Windows computer.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U1 is even weirder, in that it's actually two computers—the specs listed in the chart are for the tablet detached, but when it's attached to its base, it switches both hardware and software. In its attached form, it's a Windows 7 laptop with a full keyboard and trackpad, Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, eSATA, VGA- and HDMI-out, and all the other amenities you'd expect from a modern thin-and-light. We just have see what it's like when it ships in June.

Data Sources:
Apple iPad: [Gizmodo]
HP Slate: [Gizmodo, GDGT; Tipster]
Fusion Garage JooJoo: [Gizmodo]
Notion Ink Adam: [Slashgear]
Dell Mini 5: [Gizmodo, Gizmodo]
Archos 7 Android: [DanceWithShadows, Gizmodo]
Lenovo IdeaPad U1: [Lenovo, Gizmodo, Gizmodo]
Archos 9: [UMPCPortal, Archos]

A quick word about "slates" vs. "tablets": These are tablets, and it's a word we prefer. The sad fact is, it's overused. There's no way to say "tablet" without including every godawful stylus-based convertible laptop built since 2002. (Thank you, Bill Gates!) And even the new touchscreen tablets come in single-pane and keyboard-equipped laptop styles. So "slate," good or bad, is the more apt term.

The highlight of Steve Ballmer's slate introduction was the different modes—ebook reader, movie player—you can quickly jump to. But then and now, the story is really Windows, and those modes are just apps, running with the Start menu and all the familiar Windows accoutrements in full view. Being powered by Windows 7 is great, but I am not sure how I feel about this approach. What we see here is a Windows 7 desktop running a browser and a NYT app (aka another browser). I still think it's cute, but I think everyone would agree that the hardware is not the story—smoother software is needed to make the tablet lifestyle palatable.

It's still early, and knowing HP's TouchSmart team, something is in the works, at least a nice skin. McKinney promises to deliver the product "in 2010," and for a price that's "in the affordable range," that is to say, much less than $1500. I'm not even going to guess. Here's hoping that HP and Microsoft can pull off an impressive product of their own, to rival Apple's as-yet-unseen frontrunner in this battle of vapor and wills. [HP on YouTube]

"This is the boldest step we have seen so far in 3-D printing," says Scott Summit, chief technology officer for Bespoke Innovations, a company that creates 3-D artifacts for medical use. "A lot of people want to do 3-D printing but it is a mysterious world. With HP embracing it, it is likely to demystify the idea to many consumers."

"There are millions of 3-D designers using 2-D printers," says Santiago Morera, vice president and general manager of HP's large format printing business, in a statement. "Stratasys' technology is the ideal platform for HP to enter the market and begin to capitalize on this untapped opportunity."

There aren't any specifics on the hardware or the price, but hobbyists and small businesses should be pretty excited about the future. In the meantime, your cheapest option for 3D printing continues to be the Makerbot. It's certainly not as advanced as the HP printer promises to be, but a kit will only set you back $750. [Wired]