Well, look at that. A Rocketfish tablet. Can’t say we saw this coming, but Best Buy’s CTO and Geek Squad founder, Robert Stephens, just tweeted two pics of the surprisingly polished-looking tablet. We’re currently digging for more details but from what we can tell from the pics, the tablet looks remarkable similar to early HP Slate pics. Every seem and port seems to be the same right down to the (docking?) port on the bottom. Even if it’s not built on the same platform, the screen sizes look about the same, placing the Rocketfish tablet in the 9-inch range.
Best Buy’s Rocketfish brand is full of re-branded items like this. There’s computer parts, A/V equipment, even GPS units. We have no idea what OS the Rocketfish tablet is running, but if HP is making this tablet (and we don’t know for sure), then the tablet could either use webOS or Windows 7. The company previously stated the Windows 7 HP Slate 500 is headed to the enterprise space, rather than the consumer market. Perhaps this is HP’s answer. If the product fails, it doesn’t go directly on HP as most consumers wouldn’t know who actually made it. If the experiment works, then they can shift the Slate 500 (or its successor) to also serve the consumer space.
However, Stephens tweeted in early July that the company was working on an Android 2.2 tablet. This could be it. It’s hard to say at this point seeing as we’ve seen companies switch OSs mid-stream as a market correction. Either way, it seems as if Best Buy itself will be a player in the still wide-open tablet market.
Of course we don’t have any hardware specs for the device just yet. Hopefully we’ll find that out shortly, but something tells us Best Buy isn’t going to say much. This has the distinct smell of a viral marketing campaign.
[Thanks for the tip, Ray!]