A challenger appears!!  The Great Tablet War continues.  Apple was the first major player on the field and completely destroyed all competitors to the point that we cannot even remember their names…  But that dominance will only hold for so long.

On Engadget (who else) we have a leak of the new HP Slate.  And the specs look great. We have been hearing rumors for awhile, but this is first with some teeth. Its going for $549, an 8.9′ 1024×600 mutli-touch display.  We have a 1.6 g processor and UMA with accelerator for 1080p video playback. Nice.

Now, look what new weapons this HP brings to the battle.  TWO.. count them TWO cameras!  A SDHC slot, USB port, Sim slot for the 3G.  GPS! (why?) Dock connector of course. The battery is 5 hours, 1/2 of the ‘claimed’ 10 hr ipad – now really… 1o hours?  Anyway,  we have windows7 installed.  That a big point because that mean pen support, AND that means you can write as an input.  For anyone who has used a windows7 tablet/slate, the handwriting recognition is action pretty good, so but win there.

Now for those of you questioning running Windows7 on a 1.6g processor, I have an old HP TC1100 with 1.2g and 2 g of ram with a SSD and its runs great!!  I’m sure the Atom will hold up as well if not better.  The real key here will be the graphics card and the speed of processing touch screen response.  It has to equal if not exceed the glossy feel that I get with the ipad.  Had to be THAT fast. Anything less, and this could be a short battle indeed.   So let the clash of titans begin!!

Now check out this video…