ExoPC Slate

Specs: Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, 23GB/64GB, 11.6-inch capacitive LCD at 1366x768, 1.3MP front-facing camera, 950g.

What we think: While the list is dominated by Android tablets, let's not forget poor old Windows 7. It's in no way a touch-friendly operating system, but that doesn't mean there isn't some decent hardware out there doing its best. The ExoPC Slate is the best Windows tablets at present, and so if you MUST have Windows on your tablet, this is currently the one to get.

For the same price as the iPad, you'll soon be able to get an 11-inch Windows 7 tablet.

The ExoPC Slate has comparable storage to the iPad (32 or 64GB) but it also has a webcam, hardware-accelerated Flash (and Silverlight), handwriting recognition, fully accessible USB ports and an SD card slot – and of course it runs any Windows application you want.

If that were enough to rival the iPad, PC manufacturers would have been outselling Apple for months. The iPad may be locked down and far less powerful than a PC, but it's also slick, lightweight and supremely usable.

For all the advantages of Windows, making a tablet PC that's cheap, portable and attractive isn't that easy.

The announcement of the iPad also produced a flurry of slate and tablet PC announcements. Despite the fact that there have been stylus-powered tablet PCs with handwriting recognition since 2003, with an increasing number of touch-enabled netbooks appearing in the last year, most of this new generation of lightweight Windows tablets without attached keyboards have taken until late 2010 to make it from announcement to availability.

They've been beaten to the market not just by the iPad but by Android tablets ranging from the fast-selling Galaxy Tab to a plethora of budget me-too devices such as the Advent Vega.

Major PC makers seem to feel that Windows isn't quite right for a device with no keyboard that's aimed at mainstream consumers rather than industrial and business users (hence the Windows Embedded entertainment tablets we've seen instead).

Some, such as Dell and Toshiba, have been rushing to capitalise on buyers' enthusiasm for Android instead. Viewsonic's disappointing dual-boot ViewPad 10 has just arrived and although Microsoft encouraged HP to announce its Slate at CES 2009, it's only now going on sale (in very limited numbers, as HP concentrates instead on forthcoming webOS tablets).

That means that although Windows 7 runs happily on a wide range of Atom netbooks, it still has to prove itself as a touch and tablet operating system. Is this the tablet to do it? Maybe.

The ExoPC Slate has taken this long to become available because it comes from a small Canadian company that has had to switch suppliers and is still negotiating for distributors in some countries (including the UK).

It's also developed its own touch user interface for launching apps; a promising approach that's still something of a work in progress (and doesn't get in the way if you want to stick with using the standard Windows 7 interface, which has some optimisations for touch.

ExoPC Slate: Features

The ExoPC tablet certainly feels professionally designed; it's well-built and sturdy.

There's a wide bezel around the touchscreen so you can hold it without worrying about accidentally touching the screen and the sleek rounded corners, smooth edges and pleasant matt finish on the back make it comfortable to hold (that and the texture of the vents for the twin speakers give you a good grip).

It's heavier than an iPad (just under a kilogram) and larger (to fit in the 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 resolution screen), but at 14mm it's barely any thicker.

The top bezel holds the ambient light sensor and 1.3-megapixel webcam; the bottom bezel is a little wider than the others, to give you more of a grip in portrait mode (and it helps you pick it up the right way up without looking at the back every time).

The high screen resolution is ideal for video, but it also means you can fit a whole web page (or a Word document or ebook page) in portrait mode.

We've seen brighter and more vivid screens, but they're on high-end Sony laptops, and the screen quality is perfectly satisfactory, especially when you have the brightness up.

What is a little disappointing is the viewing angle; if you have the ExoPC slate flat on your lap it can actually look as if it's turned off. That's not a problem if you have it in the promised dock, but we did sometimes wish it had a built-in kickstand.

Connections

Apart from the dock connector on the bottom, all the ports are tucked away at one side of the screen: an audio socket for when you want to use headphones or a microphone; two USB ports; an SD card slot (which you can use for extra storage or just for transferring images from a camera) and a mini-HDMI port. This gives you full 1080p output, so you can drive a projector or a big-screen TV from the tablet.

There's a SIM slot on the side too, although our review model didn't have a 3G module. The power socket is tiny and, while it's far larger than the iPad charger, the power brick is unusually small and light for a PC (smaller and lighter than the adapter for the Sony VAIO P, for example).

If you end up at the Windows boot screen faced with a menu – long before the touch drivers have loaded – you don't need to plug in a keyboard; the light sensor in the top left corner also marks a touch button that you can tap to scroll through menus and press for five seconds to use as an Enter key.

It's a nice touch to mask one of the few remaining areas where Windows creaks on a touch-only device – everything else, even the BIOS, works with touch. Even so we'd like to see a hardware rotation button, hardware volume controls and a mute button.

The power button on the back falls comfortably under your hand when you're holding the tablet in landscape mode (you do have to get used to tapping this rather than pressing for too long, which wakes the tablet up then puts it back to sleep straight away).

And although centuries of books and magazines have conditioned us to use tablets in portrait mode, the ExoPC user interface means that you'll spend quite a lot of time using it in landscape mode.