HP Slate Tablet for Small Business

The HP Slate will be released to con­sumers the first week of Novem­ber, and I’m anx­ious to see how this new tool can help ser­vice com­pa­nies be more pro­duc­tive and sell more work. The released price for the HP Slate starts at $799. Expect to spend a min­i­mum of $900 with ship­ping and a few extras and pos­si­bly as much as $1200 after you install MS Office. The HP Slate is noth­ing like the Apple iPad. I pur­chased an iPad short­ly after it was released think­ing that it would be the next small busi­ness Tablet. It was not! Although I loved the iPad, I sold it, because it was just a big toy, and I have enough gad­gets. The iPad oper­at­ed off of Apps (Appli­ca­tions) not stan­dard desk­top soft­ware. The HP Slate, on the oth­er hand, will oper­ate sim­i­lar to a stan­dard desk­top com­put­er. In my opin­ion, that alone will blow the Apple iPad away by mak­ing it a price­less tool for a ser­vice com­pa­ny. My only con­cern about the new HP Slate is this: It is a PC run­ning Win­dows! I’m real­ly con­cerned that after 6 months, your once fast HP Tablet will be boot­ing up and run­ning at the speed of a tur­tle who ate a bot­tle of sleep­ing pills. I hope I’m wrong on this one! So, give the HP Slate a try and let me know what you think. So far, it sounds like a good invest­ment. A Quick Back­ground on my Tablet PC experience Tablet com­put­ers have been out for close to 10 years, but have had 2 major prob­lems: 1) They are very expen­sive and 2) Not very reli­able. Despite these draw­backs, Tablet PCs have made ser­vice com­pa­nies a lot of mon­ey by sav­ing them time! I pur­chased my first Tablet PC in 2004 to help stream­line my esti­mat­ing process while work­ing for my father’s paint­ing busi­ness. Pre-Tablet days, I’d do a take­off with pen and paper, dri­ve back to the office, type in my num­bers into Excel, print out the esti­mate and mail it or hand-deliv­er it to the prospect. Phew, just typ­ing that sen­tence makes me tired! Any­ways, when I got my Toshi­ba Tablet, I was able to do my take­off, show a con­sumer the price and even get them to sign the pro­pos­al right on the screen, sav­ing me 1 pos­si­bly 2 hours per esti­mate. A few years lat­er, I upgrad­ed to the small­est Tablet at the time, a Motion Com­put­ing 800. To this day, I still like that device. It was about the same size of the new HP Slate but very heavy and unre­li­able. My machine cost almost $3000 and broke on 2 – 3 occasions.