After Steve Ballmer made some emphatic remarks about Microsoft building a slate device to compete with the iPad, the company gave a demonstration of Windows 7 that might signal how such a device might work.

Ballmer spoke at the company's annual Financial Analysts Meeting Thursday to about 200 people at Microsoft's executive briefing center in Redmond.

Brad Brooks, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Windows division, did a demonstration on a touch-screen slate device and showed a variety of features bring in photos and video stored on the Internet and on other computers. It may portend what users could do on a Windows slate device.

Photo editing. Brooks spliced together a group photo of Sounders fans using the new Windows Live photo editing software. Four people are in a group, none were looking at the camera in all the shots, so Brooks pasted together the four photos so everyone was facing the camera. He then took that photo and did some ...

Video messaging. With the new versions of Windows Live Messenger, which is now in beta, Brooks did some live video chatting on the device and shared his new photo. The iPad does not have video chatting capability, and it's unknown whether any future Windows 7 slate device would have a camera built in, but the one Brooks showed on stage did.

Ultimate remote control. Brooks used media software to play video stored on different devices on different televisions and computers. For instance, using his slate device, he retrieved video stored on a desktop PC and played the video to a television connected to an Xbox.