Tablet News: Toshiba Tablet in October, HP Tablet to Use Pen
The tablet industry has far more tablets on the drawing board than on store shelves, but Toshiba has decided to make its own tablet plans official.
At a press conference commemorating 25 years of laptops from Toshiba, Mark Whittard, Managing Director of Toshiba Australia, showed off a prototype of what will be the Toshiba SmartPad. Prototypes don't mean much – every company has a prototype by now – but Whittard said the SmartPad would be available for consumers this October.
Toshiba plans to make several versions, including one that runs Android and another that runs Windows 7 . It's not clear which operating system the SmartPad prototype was running. Other details include HMDI and USB ports, but little information beyond that.
The Toshiba tablet sounds fairly standard in comparison to the myriad tablets coming around the same time, but another rumor about the Hewlett Packard tablet indicates it might not be more of the same. The HP Slate started out as a Windows 7 tablet , which was canned, then turned into an Android tablet . Finally it was suggested the HP tablet will run Palm WebOS and likely be called the PalmPad. Now sources in HP say the WebOS tablet will also have digital pen support, which means it will usable with a finger or a stylus of some sort.
Fingers are great for navigation, but a digital pen can make tablets much more accurate, similar to the Wacom tablets used by many artists and designers to "draw" on a computer. The PalmPad will be able to use both.
