HP Slate 500 Camera Demo

The HP Slate 500 comes with a pair of webcams for video calls and to capture photos and videos. I gave the 3MP camera on the bacl of the Slate 500 a spin and recorded the following video. If you want to read more about the HP Slate 500, you can read more about the specifications here, or watch an in-depth video overview of the Slate 500 here.

The bundled HP camera application is pretty straight forward and there aren’t a lot of options. The maximum recording size for video 640×480 (VGA) with the  front-facing camera. It’s not terribly impressive in terms of quality, but it appears to function much as you’d expect. The resulting video is pretty decent and definitely clear enough to use for basic video tasks. You’re not going to want to create a hollywood blockbuster on this thing, but it is good enough for putting together something quick and dirty.

The HP Slate 500 is light enough to hold steadily with two hands, proving a smoother picture than using a single hand, as I often do with my iPhone.

While HP is positioning this as a business device, it is an iPad competitor in many ways. The presence of not one, but two cameras on the HP Slate 500 feels like a luxury compared to the iPad. There are just too many use cases to not have a pair of cameras on the next iPad.

HP says that insurance adjustors, inspectors and other mobile professionals will likely use the Slate 500’s 3MP webcam to document incidents, such as auto accidents. The VGA camera can be used with video chat applications, such as Skype.

The HP Slate 500 has an MSRP of $799 and comes with a 64GB SSD, 2GB of memory, an Intel Atom processor and 9.7″ touchscreen display.  It runs on Windows 7 Professional and comes pre-loaded with Evernote, a popular note-taking application.