Apple may have been the biggest show of early 2010 but it’s by no means the only one. Tablet PCs continue to crawl out of the woodwork. The latest is the ExoPC Slate, an 8.9-inch multitouch tablet that runs Windows 7. The new slate provides users with the “web without compromise”, offering full Web browser support (including the elusive flash ignored by some others). Other specs include a 1.6 GHz Atom N270 processor, 2GB of DDR2 memory, 32GB SSD and SD expansion. The slate features a user-replaceable battery that provides four hours of juice.

The Slate will hit the market next month for a starting price of $599, putting it at the same price as the iPad 32GB– though we don’t think this one will make quite the splash that the iPad does. [via Engadget]

The Apple tablet may be making its grand emergence tomorrow, but at least one company is reminding the world that Apple isn’t the only game in town. Today, the world got a closer look at the HP slate thanks to some video in which CTO Phil McKinney reveals a bit about the manufacturing process behind it.

While the video falls short of providing specs on the slate that was first seen in the hands of Steve Ballmer at CES, it does give a little background. Originally envisioned as an e-reader five years ago, the tablet evolved into a full-fledged multimedia device capable of video, music and Web. The Windows 7-based slate will hit market later this year at a “mainstream price point”.

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Getting sick of tablet announcements yet? How about vague tablet allusions that don’t really give any hard details? Yeah, we’re pretty tired of those to.

To compound our irritation, Dell has chosen to tease its own tablet with the very barest of minimums in terms of information. Introduced at its keynote speech this evening, we know that Dell’s tablet is on the compact size, featuring just a 5-inch screen. It’ll be based on Android and will include a slot for SIM card.

So basically, we have about as much information as we did from the rumors a month ago.

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HP Windows Slate

Yesterday, all most of the hype in the electronics world was devoted to the rumors that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer would be using his keynote speech for a big tablet unveil. Would it be the fabled MS Courier? Would Microsoft finally upstage Apple, signaling a new dynamic for a new decade? No, no and a little more no.

Instead, we got peripheral information on an HP slate running Windows 7– a nice-looking little computer, but nothing to live up to all the pre-speech hype. PR fail.

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