A look at HP's upcoming Slate, via Wired GadgetLab:

Now, I'm an avid Flash-platform developer, so it should come as no surprise that Apple's refusal to support Flash on its iPhone and iPad platforms frustrates me; it's largely why I've never picked up an iPhone, one of several reasons I've chosen not to wade into the waters of iPhone development, and primarily why you won't catch me buying an iPad next month. This Slate device interests me, though. Sure, it's an iPad clone, but the iPad, a tablet PC, doesn't really seem all that revolutionary, either. And of course, it (the Slate) runs Flash and AIR, which is great. But I'm not here to evangelize the Slate. I'm saying that I think the Slate, and devices like it, will push Apple to support Flash much sooner than it would have had it not decided to build the iPad.

Tablet PCs like the Slate and the iPad are, it seems, a good deal more PC-like than phone-like; using one feels considerably more like using one's laptop than cell phone. So it's no great leap of the imagination to presume, then, that users will probably expect their tablets (Slates, iPads, whatever) to behave more like their PCs -- to do as much, or nearly so, as their laptops or netbooks do now -- than their cells. Slate users, for their part (the Slate runs Windows 7, incidentally) are bound to be more satisfied with their experience in this respect.

But iPad users, I'm guessing, are going to feel the absence of Flash much more acutely than iPhone users do today -- and I think that'll actually put pressure on Apple to support Flash on the iPad, lest it be forced to continually explain its (primarily financial, and I think customer-antagonistic) reasons for not supporting Flash in the first place. The iPad already looks like a crippled, if quite pretty, netbook. Denying its users the option to run Flash only serves to cripple it more.

So it seems there are three possible outcomes to all this: (1) that users don't care -- they're so enamored with their iPads and iPhones that the Flash exclusion just doesn't matter to them enough to keep them from handing over their cash; (2) that users get wise and simply stop buying iPads and iPhones in response to Apple's rejection of Flash; or (3) Apple grudgingly concedes and begins to support Flash, first on the iPad, and then, ultimately -- in a great big blowback of irony -- on the iPhone. I don't usually go in for technology predictions, because I tend to suck at them, but in this case, if the tablet phenomenon catches on (and I actually think it will, thanks largely to the Kindle and the iPad), I'd bet on the third scenario -- at least the iPad part of it. If folks start buying tablets in good numbers, I do think we'll see Flash on the iPad relatively soon.

Place your bets....