PreCentral: Did HP show off an upcoming tablet in a new commercial?

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Sometimes HP does okay with advertising, sometimes they do poorly, and sometimes they shoot for the aspirational and miss the mark. The latest sixty-second spot from HP (after the break) does a bit of all three, and in typical HP fashion has done little to explain to me why I should want, let alone buy, HP's gear. But what it did do was show off something we haven't seen much of to this point: a new HP tablet.

Seen only from the rear and twice in the commercial (once from afar and barely on the screen around 0:34, and again up close at 0:56), the tablet appears to be in the 10-inch screen-size ballpark and has a metal body with a big black plastic antenna window along one side. Even though the glances are brief, we're kind of getting an 'Envy' vibe from the tablet.

Seeing as there's no seeing of the front, there's no telling what software the tablet's running. If we had to guess, it's probably got an Intel chip running Windows 8. But fear not, webOS fan, for all it takes is one recollection of HP's decision to use the Linux Standard Kernel in Open webOS for us to conjure the possibility that this hardware could also run the upcoming open source successor to webOS.

Or it could just be HP's mad men making things up, as they're prone to do…

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