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I am posting about what is going on with HP Slate tablet….enjoy the post….

The HP Slate, due to be released by HP later this year or early 2011, is gaining a lot of interest. To help fans get a copy, a new contest has been launched. All that’s required to enter is an email address.

The competition will be giving out a set number of HP Slate’s regardless of how many people enter, so you’re always in with a decent chance. You can enter for the competition here.

The HP Slate will be in direct competition with the Apple iPad and Asus Eee Pad. It is likely to be around the $500 mark when released.

PC chief of HP Taiwan, Monty Wong, has told daily trade paper Digitimes that Palm’s WebOS will be used on “smartphones and tablets”, a category that would include an HP Slate. According to Digitimes, the newly-acquired OS will only be used for these touch-based devices. Netbooks and other computers will continue to use desktop operating systems.

Wong said that “HP will announce more details after the completion of the Palm acquisition at the end of July.” So far Digitimes offers no other details (the story is classed as a “snapshot”, and should be added to shortly), but the move to use WebOS on slates and phones is really an obvious one. After all, why buy Palm otherwise?

Oh, for those halcyon days of early January. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was on stage, Hewlett-Packard tablet in hand, and the iPad was still officially a rumor.

Six months later, it’s a brave new world. HP is buying Palm, the the Apple iPad is now the geek accoutrement du jour, and the poor HP Slate? Locked in a closet, if not a dustbin.

Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps helped host her firm’s Untethered conference Wednesday in New York City, and generated this tweet: “HP: WebOS tablet coming. No comment on Windows device.”

Interesting post by our friend Harry McCracken at Technologizer today, pointing out that HP’s gone dead silent about the Slate ever since it announced plans to acquire Palm. Harry was at The Big Money’s Untethered conference today, and HP CTO Phil McKinney was on stage, where he “talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices” and “extolled the virtues of webOS.” Interesting topic, since the Slate very prominently ran Windows 7. When pressed, Phil said he couldn’t talk about unreleased products, which is a big change: it’s been six months since Steve Ballmer first showed the Slate at CES, and since then HP’s produced several rah-rah videos, one of them featuring none other than Phil McKinney himself.

When Apple had launched its iPad the industry was abuzz with stories that other companies will also bring out their own tablet computer. Some names like Google, Microsoft, Dell and others came up immediately. It was understood that the overwhelming success of the gadget had forced them to mull on this issue.

The HP Slate has disappeared. Experts say that things were not very clear about the Windows 7-based tablet that Microsoft had promised to unroll. In the beginning for some weeks HP kept the Slate in the news by posting videos and other information on it. However, even then those who had seen it say that it was kept vague. And then gradually the company preferred not to update details about the gadget on its website.  Now the story circulating on the web is that it may use Palm’s WebOS instead on Windows 7. But it is still too early to jump to any conclusion. Let us wait and watch.

Harry takes this new silence to mean that the HP Slate is dead, and we’re beginning to think he’s right: although we haven’t heard anything concrete, we definitely noticed HP’s absence at tablet-heavy Computex, and at this rate, the Slate’s rumored 1.6GHz Atom Z530 will be hopelessly out of date by the time it launches — Intel’s now showing off Moorestown Atom Z600 tablets and it’s got the Windows-tablet focused Oak Trail Atom planned for early next year. The window’s closing a little more with every passing day — at this point, HP needs to come clean just so we can all move on to waiting for the Hurricane.

Between Android, the iPad and now HP’s tablet plans, this newly-reinvigorated device category is white-hot. Apple has proved that people are willing to buy a simple, easy to use device that frees them from babysitting a full PC OS. HP clearly sees its mobile future as a vertical system, just like Apple’s, instead of just churning out commodity PC hardware for Microsoft to slap Windows into. The next stage of the computer’s evolution is well under way.

Resources :wired.com,viralsocialite.com,gearlog.com,engadget.com