The new HP TouchPad....

The webOS-powered HP TouchPad was released in the beginning of July and after spending over 15 minutes with one at Best Buy I was planning to skip this tablet. HP then had some crazy deals where you could find the 16GB model for $300 and a Twitter buddy found a deal on Craigslist so I jumped on one for $325. After spending the weekend using the TouchPad for several hours, I have to say it is better than the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, but even at just over $300 I still can’t recommend this tablet to anyone and the iPad is all I can tell people to buy when they ask about 10 inch tablets.

      FYI, this TouchPad I purchased does have the latest OS update so my issues below are not due to an old firmware. Just this morning I sat there for about a minute with the Wall Street Journal app open and no taps or swipes registering as the TouchPad just sat there being unresponsive. Pressing the button did take it to the home screen, but there was no display responses when touching the screen within an app.
     

Hardware

               The HP TouchPad is not an elegant tablet and is a chunky beast with a super glossy back.It makes up for some of my hardware concerns with the rounded corners, decent stereo speakers, and very slick Touchstone charging dock. The iPad and iPad 2, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and even the Motorola Xoom are all better hardware. I don’t understand why HP couldn’t have released a tablet with a slimmer profile, especially after they saw the first generation iPad and knew another would be coming soon. The TouchPad is 0.54 of an inch thick while the iPad 2 is 0.34 and the original iPad is 0.5. The TouchPad also weighs in at 1.6 pounds compared to the iPad 2 at 1.3 pounds. I am not too bothered by the weight since a 10 inch tablet is going to have some heft to it, but the thickness bothers me when compared to my sleek iPad 2.

Operating system

                  webOS is a very slick UI with a great multi-tasking design through the cards and I do like it on the HP TouchPad, but even with just a few apps loaded up I have been seeing “too many cards open” errors and am beginning to think that Apple and Microsoft may have multi-tasking better designed for today’s mobile devices. iOS and Windows Phone 7 multi-tasking essentially freezes the background apps when you go elsewhere and I find double-tapping and selecting an open app on the bottom row of my iPad to be a much more efficient means of jumping between apps.