The New HP TouchPad

The New HP TouchPad -It’s time for HP fans in UK to celebrate as HP TouchPad makes a grand appearance at HP stores and other leading high street retailers there. You can get the webOS tablet from PC World, Curry’s, Amazon , Argos, Comet, Carphone Warehouse and HP.co.uk/touchpad.

HP TouchPad is already available in US, France and Germany since July 1. HP TouchPad is its first venture in the tablet arena.
Expect to see HP TouchPad on your TV screens, newspapers, and magazines as HP kicks off its intensive advertising campaign covering TV, print, online and OOH.

The TouchPad is a 9.7-inch tablet running WebOS 3.0. Priced at £399 for the 16GB version or £479 for the 32GB model, it matches the corresponding iPads in terms of price and capacity. First the good bits

 The operating system, webOS, has the potential to be a great operating system. Slick, easy to use, and a true multi-tasking OS.aesthetically appealing operating system, and it's a decent piece of work physically.
 Hmmm.

Lay it flat on a desk and it's a millimetre thinner than the iPad. HP was right not to fear invidious comparisons with the iPad. The TouchPad's aspect ratio is the ideal balance for a device destined to be used in both portait and landscape orientations.

Like the iPad, the HP tablet uses an LCD screen based in In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology, making for spectacular viewing angles, vertically and horizontally.

 The tablet’s main screen show all your running apps as a series of cards through which you can scroll horizontally. Nice. The native apps were well done. Likewise you can link the calendar app up to a number of sources. Both the Facebook app and the Spaz (Twitter) apps made good use of the tablet sized screen. Now the bad bits.

Some apps don’t work properly, some don’t work at all. iPlayer was jerky and inconsistent. The TED app never worked at all.

Overall
This is the first iteration and that old adage about never buying version 1.0 of anything is never truer.
HP are talking about integrating WebOS into all their devices.