Salivating for that iPad? I bet.. Check out what else is due to ship this year.

In a year that will be defined by tablet PC releases i’m going to fight my urges to splurge on the iPad and hold out for HP’s Slate.

My logic for the decision is based on HP’s open standards as opposed to Apple’s walled garden. The video above emphasizes Adobe’s Flash and Air support on the HP Slate, which will be sorely missed on the iPad. Coupled with the fact that HP will be running a derivative of Windows 7 means I can load basic business intelligence applications I already have.

Anybody who owns an iPhone will attest to how annoying the lack of Flash support is. Granted it’s no showstopper, I can surf the web notwithstanding Steve’s decision to forgo Flash for support of the App Store. Games are the highest grossing items in the App Store and casual gaming is one of Flash’s strengths. Will we see Flash support in future iPad / iPhone updates? I think the market will determine that. There’s a horde of new Tablet PC’s about to be released, you can bet all of them will support Flash and Air in some incarnation.

Microsoft Courier may set the cat amongst the pigeons once it’s formally announced, the courier is a dual screen tablet aimed squarely at the journaling set.. In a perfect world, I would have a HP Slate as my sitting on the lounge surfing / reading device and the Courier would replace my diary and notebooks in my laptop bag.