A lot of tablets presented at CES this year were powered by Atom CPUs mainly because every manufacturer already has netbooks and other gadgets running on Atom and it’s easy to implement them in similar devices (from hardware point of view). It works for netbook tablets and convertible tablets but it doesn’t work for slate devices and I’m going to tell you why be looking at the Inkia MID500 slate tablet (handled by Crunchgear) with a 5 inch display, a very similar device as functionality to Dell’s Streak 5 inch tablet prototype.

    First an Atom CPU is not powerfull enough to handle HD Video, and slate tablets are meant especially for multimedia use as they don’t have a keyboard (suited for office work), but without HD support there’s little you can do on Youtube and Hulu. Atom CPUs consume less power than any other laptop processor but if you shrink down in size from 12 inches to 5 inches there’s a lot of heat to dissipate in such a small package, which means active cooling, which means noise and… you get the point. Now smaller shape also means smaller battery and what’s the purpose of a slate tablet that can only last you 2-3 hours with moderate use.

    Old looking Inkia MID500

    Old looking Inkia MID500

    Those kind or problems are sure to hit almost every small slate tablet running Atom CPU, a processor not suited for this task. We’d be more happy with the Tegra 2 chipset, specially developed for tablets. I wonder what will Intel do this year as they don’t have anything suited for slim slate tablets but I bet they’re working hard right now. Till we get something from them let’s watch the hands on with the 350 $ Inkia MID500 and see if I was right with what I said above: