Microsoft beats Apple in unveiling ‘slate PC’

©AFP Steve Ballmer shows the new HP Slate computer and e-reader

Microsoft on Wednesday evening positioned itself for a potential war over a new category of touch-screen “tablet” computers as Steve Ballmer, chief executive, anticipated an expected major product announcement from Apple by showing off a version running on Windows software.

The Microsoft boss used his speech at the opening of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to highlight the product, made by Hewlett-Packard.

However, no launch details or specifications for the device were given, and Mr Ballmer struck a deliberately low-key note with the device rather than using it to throw down a direct challenge to Apple.

In an on-stage demonstration at the consumer electronics industry’s biggest annual gathering, Mr Ballmer showed the small touch-screen device, which looked like an enlarged version of Apple’s iPhone. It runs Amazon’s Kindle eReader software and can be used to play games – the main functions expected to be offered by the rumoured Apple device.

While putting down a marker for the future, the demonstration suggested that Microsoft has no product close to launch that might be capable of rivalling Apple. Also, the company made no mention on Wednesday of a separate project, code-named Courier, that has stirred considerable speculation in consumer tech circles, and which would involve it putting its own brand on a new two-screen gadget.

Apple has set a major product announcement for later this month, and has been working for some time on bringing out a touch-screen device larger than the iPhone. However, Steve Jobs, chief executive, has a history of pulling back from product announcements even at the eleventh hour if he does not belief the device is complete in every detail, and earlier versions of the tablet have failed to see the light of day.

Other than the HP device, which he referred to as a “slate PC”, Mr Ballmer did not venture into other new classes of portable computers where Microsoft has been falling behind. Speaking a day after the launch of the hotly anticipated handset running Google’s software, he made no mention of Microsoft’s own efforts to make up lost ground in smartphones, but promised more news at next month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Instead, the Microsoft boss sought to switch attention back to consumer products where the software giant has a more entrenched position, particularly consumer PCs running the new Windows 7 operating system and the Xbox games console.

In the latest sign of an upturn in the PC market since the launch of Windows 7 last autumn, Mr Ballmer said that sales of consumer PCs in the US over the latest holiday period were up more than 50 per cent from the year before, according to figures from market analysis firm NPD.

Microsoft also disclosed that a new user interface for the Xbox 360, known as Natal, would go on sale by the holiday season at the end of 2010. Natal employs image recognition to sense a player’s movements and uses these to direct the action in a game.