I was going through YouTube this morning when I came across this video showing a comparison between a Windows 7 based Slate PC and an Apple iPad. What was surprising for me was how in some places the Windows 7 based “Hanvon” Slate did better job than its iPad counterpart – Internet Explorer 8 was faster to load pages than Mobile Safari, the YouTube web app on Windows 7 was certainly loading videos much faster than the native YouTube app on iPad and so on.

We were really willing to see the HP Slate PC in action but sadly HP pulled the plug on it, stating that Intel’s hardware is power hungry and Microsoft’s Windows 7 is not a good Tablet PC operating system. But now, ExoPC has come up with a similar Slate PC, that runs Windows 7 and does 1080p videos.

Steve Jobs yesterday announced the most awaited and hyped Apple product in recent times – the iPad in his keynote address at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. On the other hand, HP Slate was first shown by Steve Ballmer at CES earlier this month. Both type of devices are of same form factor i.e. tablet/slate which many think may decide the future of general purpose computing.

As reported previously, Steve Ballmer in his keynote today at CES 2010 announced the HP Slate PC which is said to go retail later this year. What is interesting about this Slate PC is that instead of running a stripped down or a customized version of Windows or Windows Mobile, it will be running full fledged version of Windows 7 (Starter most probably). Here is what Ballmer had to say about it.