At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, demonstrated a new prototype “Slate” PC by Hewlett Packard (HP).

His demonstration showed it running the Kindle book-reading software under Windows 7, taking advantage of its touch-screen technology (or “touch-screen experience” as he put it).

Reaction to this product, and similar devices by Archos and Pegatron, was luke-warm.  Nobody was seeing anything new.  It didn’t appear to be much more than the XP-based Tablet PC that Microsoft attempted to introduce way back in 2002.

Personally, I have a Hewlett Packard hx4700 PDA running Pocket PC 2003.  This device was released as long ago as 2004.  I use it with Adobe Reader to read books that I have created from text files downloaded from Project Gutenberg.  Ok, the screen on my PDA is nowhere near the size of the Slate PC, but it is touch-sensitive and I use it to scroll the page while reading.  How does that differ from what Steve Ballmer was demonstrating?

Of course, the new device, running Windows 7 is much more powerful than my PDA, and can run a whole range of Windows software.   With all the glitz and hype surrounding the Windows 7 launch, why wasn’t the demonstration a bit more exciting?

I suspect that this device, being a prototype, doesn’t reliably run much else.  The other Slate PCs by Archos and Pegatron were shown displaying a video and what looked like a web browser.  perhaps they weren’t capable of running much else, either.

There are rumours about a similar device from Apple – dubbed the iSlate.  With the huge popularity of the iPhone and iPod products, people are likely to wait for the release of an iSlate before getting excited about a Windows 7 based device.  After all, Apple seem to be setting the standards for mobile devices and their user interfaces.