Monday 5 April 2010

iPad Vs HP Slate

iPad is out in the US. Yay.

OK, bored now. Years of hype leads to natural disappointment when reality sets in.

I'm actually more excited about the HP Slate than the iPad now. Being able to use a full operating system (Windows 7) rather than the scaled down but stable iPhone OS, and being able to use USB devices like hard drives and printers, is going to make the HP Slate much more user friendly in the business world than the iPad. But I'm guessing that the iPad is really meant to be a leisure device for media consumption.

I'm much more interested in media creation, though. The thought of being able to use an HP Slate with Adobe Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas Pro editing software, while still on the set of a shoot, would be amazing. The ability to do quick edits without having to find a seat and being able to follow camera operators around during shooting would be very useful, and a great help to the workflow of small video production companies. The HP Slate seems like it will be powerful enough to handle video editing applications too - with a rumoured 1.8 Ghz Core Duo cpu and 1 Gig of RAM, it would be able to handle SD video at least. That's OK for an offline edit.

It would have been great to have been able to use Apple Final Cut Studio to do this editing work on location, so hopefully Apple will be bringing out a kind of iPad Pro which would feature the full-blown OSX and the abilty to run FCS.

The closest thing we have to that at the moment is the MacBook Air. Oddly enough, the release of the iPad is making me more likely to consider buying a MacBook Air in the future....