Friday, October 22, 2010

HP's Slate specs slated by bloggers - Boing Boing:

Its most interesting characteristic is a bizarre slide-out tray that exists only to display the Windows 7 licensing information. It's like something from some kind of screwball comedy about awful product design: HP was apparently obliged to do this because it didn't want to mess up the exterior with this compulsory information panel.

When explaining to people why iOS and Linux (i.e. Android and WebOS) are the only credible options in the near future for consumer tablets, I used to have to explain to people exactly why non-touchscreen desktop operating systems like Windows 7 make them suck. Now, however, I just have to point out that Microsoft's lawyers get to impose design decisions on their hardware partners.