HP's Windows 7 Slate Device Revealed by Steve Ballmer [Slate]

It's not Courier, but HP's rumored slate PC is here, now. Steve Ballmer and his hardware specialist Ryan Asdourian just showed it off, and man is it cute.
Adrian just spotted this official video:



'They're more powerful than a phone and almost as powerful as a PC. Perfect for reading, surfing the web and taking entertainment on the go,' said Ballmer at his CES 2010 opening keynote. He says that it will be available this year.

HP says they'll provide information on the slate after the keynote, but wouldn't say anything in the meantime. We're calling it a "slate"—well, Microsoft is calling it a slate, to differentiate from the pen-and-screen dealy that Bill Gates intro'd in 2001—but that's not its name.
It's a Windows 7 touch device, so it's nice in an accessible, netbooky (yeah, I'm guessing relatively cheap) context. But it's not exactly the Courier we have lusted after from Microsoft in our dreams (and waking hours).
Here you can see it in its various modes, movie mode, ebook mode and PC mode:





Fun fact: Adsdorian, shown above with Ballmer, moonlights as a (or the) Seahawks mascot.
[Gizmodo]

Ninite installs 59 free apps with one double-click

Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 will be a whole lot easier if you use Ninite. The free online site lets you pick those extra apps you always need to hunt around the web for when you do a clean install.
Once you've checked off your choices among the 59 possibilities, you download an installer (sorry, Windows only) , double-click it and you can just walk away while it loads up all those apps on your fresh operating system. It's even smart enough to avoid installing crapware such as unnecessary toolbars.

We've been testing this routine in its beta phase, and we can tell you it works beautifully. We test a lot of operating systems here, and it's a pain to individually install apps such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader (or better yet, Foxit Reader), iTunes, Firefox, Winrar, and many others. Now, with our custom installer, everything is ready to go in minutes.

The company aims to please, asking you to suggest more apps that aren't yet included. It's hard to believe this is free.

[DVICE via Ninite]

BumpTop 3D Desktop Gets Unique Multi-Touch Gestures [Multitouch]

For all its new multi-touch goodness, Windows 7 only has about 7 basic gestures. So if you're all about the touch (and say, have a tablet PC) BumpTop's stack of unique new gestures could be a very good thing.
As we've mentioned in the past, BumpTop isn't a new OS or shell replacement, it just adds a 3D workspace to your desktop. The $30 mulit-touch version of the software is available now, but you'll need to have Windows 7 (and a multi-touch tablet, laptop or all-in-one PC). The good news: we're going to see a bunch of those arrive alongside the new OS on October 22.


[Gizmodo via BumpTop via TechCrunch]

Phoenix trims BIOS startup time down to about a second

Gather ‘round, don’t be shy. Let’s all take a look at Windows 7 booting up in about ten seconds. How is this possible? Well, turn Aero off, strip out all the bloatware, and make sure you’re using an ultra fast solid state drive. That, and trim the BIOS start time down to a little over one second.
As you can see in the video embedded on LAPTOP’s post (skip ahead to about the one minute mark) the whole BIOS song and dance doesn’t even appear. The power button is pressed, and a second or two later we see the Windows 7 startup screen.
Then, we’re greeted with the desktop – all in less time than it takes to pour a non-foamy beer. This is all possible thanks to Phoenix’s new “Instant Boot Bios,” which is currently being offered to OEMs for use in future notebooks (it might be available as an upgrade, too).
According to LAPTOP:

“Enter Phoenix’s new Instant Boot BIOS. It cuts down the post time to roughly one second. Phoenix’s Chief Scientist Steve Jones explained that the new BIOS uses UEFI technology (a new kind of BIOS platform) to power on several system devices simultaneously and to run only those processes which are absolutely necessary to hand control over to the OS.
We had a chance to view Instant Boot in action on a Lenovo T400s, which was equipped with a high-speed SSD. About one second after hitting the power button, we saw the hard drive light flickering and noticed that Windows had already started loading. Because this system had a high-speed SSD and the Windows install didn’t have a lot of extra drivers or crapware, Windows 7 itself took only 10 seconds to get us to a desktop.”

The total time for the BIOS to do its thing was 1.37 seconds – that oughta shave precious moments off of just about any computer whether it’s got a highfalutin solid state drive or not.

Phoenix’s 1-Second Instant Boot Bios Really Works [LAPTOP]
[CrunchGear]