If you want your thin client to connect through a RD Gateway then it must support RDC 6.0 or later. Even if you aren’t using RD Gateway (for example on an Intranet) it will let you use 2008 RD Services out of the box with NLA enabled. RDC 6.1 client connecting to RDS 7.0 server may support some of the new capabilities of the RDP 7 but not all of them. Still, RDP 6 would allow a thin client to be at a remote site connecting to a server over the Internet which is an attractive option for some situations where you might want to provide a remote logon for people who haven’t got a computer or where you/they don’t want to spend the money for a full PC.
HP thin clients will need to be running XP Embedded or Windows Embedded – some of the cheaper/older ones run Windows CE or various editions of Linux which only support earlier versions of RDP, typically 5.2 (or rdesktop 1.6 which is effectively the same). At the moment from the best I can tell you should look at the HP T5730 or later models such as the current T5740 – the 5730 out of the box should support RDP 6.0. XP Embedded and Windows Embedded are updated from time to time so there may be an update to the version of RDC available in a particular thin client, the latest version of XP Embedded for the T5730 is 5.1.860 but so far I haven’t got info on what is in it. This edition of XPe is also available for the older HP T5630 thin client and according to the release notes, contains “RDC version 6.0.6001, which supports RDP version 6.1”. RDP 6.1 will give you Remote Apps and some other stuff over RDP 6.0. I am looking at buying a T5630 or T5730 if I can get one at a reasonable price on Trademe, to try out at a remote site for personal interest.
FOOTNOTE: Windows CE 6.0 R2 also supports RDP 6.0. Windows CE 6.0 R2 is the operating system deployed on HP T5540 thin clients (a current model) and the older T5530. However it looks like RD Gateway is not a supported capability on the Window CE 6.0 R2 Remote Desktop client.
Also the T5720 thin client will provide “RDC version 6.0.6001, which supports RDP version 6.1” with the 5.1.710 release of XP Embedded, the device requires a minimum 512 MB RAM to run this satisfactorily but HP recommends 1 GB. However I would guess that the amount of RAM is less significant for RDP due to its low resource demands.