I've long used an old Gateway C-120x tablet, with a 12" screen and 5lb weight as my primary Bible. I've long wanted something smaller and lighter and this looks like the ticket. Actually, it's the size of the Gateway more than the weight that I have the bigger issue with. It's just big and awkward to carry around. The HP Slate is thinner and more like the size of a book and just appears to me it will be more ergonomically easy to carry around at church or fast food restaurants, etc.
The screen resolution is only 1024x600 compared to my Gateway's 1280x800. I'm someone concerned about that. I don't think profile mode is going to be very useful. With the Gateway, there's just enough room for one side bar. I've suggested to Logos before that they combine the sidebars when the window width is less than 1024 or so. I don't think sidebars will be usable at all in profile on the HP since the screen width will only be 600 pixels. But in landscape mode it should be nice. On the Gateway, I usually use it in profile mode with One Note taking the bottom half and Logos taking the top half of the screen, thus each window ends up being about 800x640. On the HP I'll have to rely on the task bar to switch between the two applications, but still get about as much real estate for each (a little shorter, but a little wider).
I am a heavy digital ink user and it appears the HP Slate has an active digitizer (thus no worries about palm rejection). It isn't clear yet whether it's Wacom (I hope) or Ntrig (I hope they've fixed the bugs that plagued them on Dell). I know Steve Jobs as pronounced that the Stylus is FAIL and the Apple Reality Distortion Field has all the Apple fanboys parroting that. Having used a stylus for a few years now, I can't imagine taking notes in any other way. Keyboards are to noise and awkward if you don't have a good desk in front of you (and I never do in note-taking situations) and virtual keyboards require my full visual attention to be on the keyboard since touch typing is impossible. Plus the ability to write, sketch, color, and highlight quickly makes the stylus simply the best tool for the job.
The hard drive is a 64GB SSD drive, so it should be quiet and somewhat fast, but SSD's aren't as much faster than rotating platters as some of the hype makes them sound. Between the size of the hard drive and the size of the screen, I'm not planning on installing Adobe Production Bundle on it and trying to do video editing. LOL. So, this won't be replacing my Gateway, but mearly supplementing it. It does mean that I will probably eventually replace the Gateway with a normal laptop instead of a convertable however. Although I would like to have that Fujutsu T900 with the 13.3 inch screen. It has an SD slot. I assume it's SDHC, although there is a new SD standard now that supports higher capacity SD cards. SDHC is limited to 32GB. With any luck it's really SDXC. I'll probably install Logos on the internal drive, and put any other large datasets on an SD card (like my music collection, or some Logos competetors that I do stilll have and use once in a blue moon).
It comes with a pretty cool dock that serves as an easel. It also comes with a nice carrying case. The pen is stored in the flap of the case instead of in the tablet proper like most (all?) previous tabletPCs have done. The ship date when I ordered is November 12, so I have plenty of time (I hope) if the reviews look bad.
The problem with what reviews I've seen so far is that the reviewers don't really understand the device nor Microsoft's support for touch. For example, one comlained that the keyboard isn't touch optimized because it floats in its own window. Yes, you can have it float in a window, or you can set and option in its settings that will dock it. More importantly, with a stylus supporting tablet, you rarely even use the software keyboard. Handwriting text is far more efficient. I only use they software keyboard for passwords or a couple places in Logos where they have a bug that ignores the handwritten text (basically any text field that is in a drop down form instead of in a floating form: for example, the library if it isn't in a floating window or tab).
