HP TouchPad

Since buying Palm, HP has been trying to give some consistency to the webOS system, their main reason for shelling out the $1 billion price tag for the creator of the Pre.
With smartphones first of all (Pre Plus, Veer and, very soon, the Pre³), then of course tablets, the market which currently has most potential, HP has now brought us the TouchPad, a 9.7-inch tablet based on the latest version of webOS (3.0).

Design & Handling

Did you say iPad? The TouchPad does little more than simply copy the general lines of the original Apple tablet. Its general feel is similar, except that here HP opts for plastic, which gives the back of the product a slightly hollow feel, such as you see on Samsung Galaxy S smartphones.
On the left hand side at the top and bottom are the two speaker outs. They're slightly unpleasant when you're handling the tablet as their positioning seems to have been designed to privilege landscape mode and holding it more logically (for us at least) puts the speakers on your thighs.
On the other side, the volume control also has an unpleasant finish and cheap look.
We've seen better but apart from these two slight drawbacks, the overall finish is okay.
 

 

The central extended button lights up when the tablet is on. At 740 grammes, you can feel it in your hand, especially as the weight distribution doesn't seem to us to be the best on the market. We've seen worse, but we've also seen much better. The back, perhaps even more subject to finger marks than the screen, doesn't hold up all that well to being carried around in a bag. It quickly picks up scratches.

A remark on the accessories: the keyboard looks quite like the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, though slightly bigger (and more practical), but marries perfectly with webOS and multitasking. We do like the inductive charging dock (especially as you can get a pair together) - you just put the tablet in the socket to charge it and
three charging modes are available: standby, digital clock or slideshow. The dock can remember a preference so that, for example, you can have the one in your bedroom set to charge the tablet in clock mode, while the charger in the living room charges in slideshow mode.

Screen

Since Apple moved over to the new generation of IPS panels for the iPad 2, the availability of the stocks used for the first wave has improved a bit and HP has been able to take advantage of this to equip its fleet of webOS tablets.

Yes, the TouchPad has an almost identical screen to the first iPad! With a contrast of 752:1, quite wide viewing angles, a very nice deltaE (colour accuracy measure) of 5.7 and nice red tones and a very well balanced gamma curve, the screen does well.
There is, like on the Apple product, a general tendency towards blues in the lighter tones and the screen is a generation down on the rest, though far from being at the bottom of the pile. All in all, the display is well balanced and does HP's OS proud.

Interface & Navigation

Over the last couple of years first Palm, then HP, got it into their heads to elaborate the ultimate OS, capable of being used everywhere, with original navigation including more of an accent on movement than the competition previously had and a strategy very much influenced by cloud computing.
With version 3.0, which is debuting on the TouchPad before being rolled out on the Veer and Pre³ smartphones, webOS has taken another step forward. Our first impression is that HP has taken too long in refining it, with much of the navigation already being used in the BlackBerry PlayBook. In fact, one of the webOS project managers was poached by RIM... All the same, HP still has some powerful weapons at its disposal.
 

Multitasking is easier and has been implemented more inventively. You move from one application to another using a playing card type system, displayed in miniature apps in the middle of the screen. The cards can be grouped by subject or links by putting them one on top of another (a long press to select and move).
For example, if a friend sends you an invitation to dinner by mail, you can put this message in one corner along with an interactive map, a contacts page from your address book and an associated remark. This very practical mode allows you to juggle between several open mails very easily. You close an application by taking it and throwing it out of the top of the frame.
 

Synergy is the very well named technology used by webOS to bring all this content together from various sources. To give you another example, all you have to do is enter the settings for your Facebook, Twitter, FlickR and other accounts to be able to see compatible content appear in the form of thumbnails classified according to your initial settings on source sites in the Photos & Videos application.
 

Among the currently thin on the ground applications now available, the Facebook app is certainly the best network dedicated mobile app. As with mails, you work with dynamic card-sized items that you put on top of each other on the display or expand to full screen. Clever and intuitive.

Another nice feature is the 'Just Type' function, a dialogue box at the top of the home screen into which you type what you're looking for and the tablet searches for it on the tablet system and the Internet.
If you type in 'DigitalVersus' for example, the TouchPad displays the associated Google search, the link to the Facebook page, mail boxes and so on. You can easily update your Facebook or Twitter status from the Just Type dialogue box. You enter a phrase and clock on the social network of your choice to post. Very efficient!
 

For more on webOS 3.0, here's a TouchPad demo video.

There are however frequent slowdowns within the OS, whether when moving from one task to another or coming out of standby or displaying photo and video content. You can expect to have to wait a long time to load a photo folder, even when not particularly heavy, while other folders full of content appear instantly.
Next, the rather volatile accelerometer can be slow to go from portrait to landscape mode (and vice versa), but can also be over-excitable and switch when you tilt the tablet just slightly.

Finally, annoyingly, in typing mode, the cursor can appear to be in one place on the page without actually being there. This can be confusing. Note that Office type applications aren't yet available except for reading documents, with editing only coming on stream in a few months time. Not so good if you're planning on using the TouchPad as a pro tool straight away.
 

Multimedia

Internet browsing is rapid, with all the trappings and is easily on a par with the latest Android Honeycomb tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook from RIM. Pages are simply and intuitively handled and are clear and legible both in portrait and landscape mode - not too much zooming required in portrait, which is good. The zoom is nevertheless efficient, both accurate and fast. The TouchPad includes a print application, though of course it's only compatible with HP wi-fi printers!

On the audio/video side however, we're in something of a wilderness. There aren't many supported formats and, worse still, there aren't yet any App Catalog applications to pick up the slack. Added to this, you sometimes have to wait a long time for content to load to the photo and video content area.

When it comes to connecting to a computer via the micro USB for the transfer of files, the TouchPad is recognised straight away as a mass storage device, whatever the system. Transfers are fast and you can create a whole lot of folders, with the tablet automatically recognising compatible formats and organising them carefully in webOS.

The sound section, which HP has proudly announced as being supplied by Beats Audio, isn't convincing, either through the headphones or the speakers. The dynamics are poor, the layer of bass impossible to play with and it takes about ten seconds for it to recognise that you've plugged the headphones in: a poor score overall for the audio.


The App Catalog must start to fill with multimedia content and games to give more consistency to this tablet. Right now, while webOS can boast 7,500 applications, only 300 are adapted to the TouchPad.
As of the official launch at the beginning of July, more applications are expected to come on stream rapidly. Among recent arrivals is the Warner app, which gives access to VOD with over 150 items in the catalogue. As a means to educating users, HP has also launched a virtual magazine, Pivot, with plenty of editorial covering tablet activities and dedicated applications.

Battery life

A positive for the Touchpad. After being fully charged, you can expect to get around 8H30 out of the TouchPad in varied usage. With the wi-fi link up being amongst the best in this category of product, prolonged Internet browsing doesn't cost you in terms of battery life.

At first having too many application cards open within a multitasking situation can use a lot of energy up but you soon learn, with the help of webOS, to adapt this to your own usage and battery life then remains well above 8H. Note also that the standby mode is very efficient in terms of energy economy. We'll have to see how battery life holds up when webOS has to manage more resource hungry apps.


At the end of the day, the TouchPad's appeal lies mainly in the OS. WebOS is a real diamond in the rough, refined by HP over time. The aggregation of content, its intelligent handling of this content (Synergy does well and we like the Just Type feature and card system) and the operating system are, at times, a real model for mobile OS'.
As with the initial release of webOS on the first Pre, we are however left with the impression that the software is limited by the hardware. We tend to think that rather than the processor itself (there is a dual-core with a high clock under the hood after all), it must have been badly optimised. The lack of multimedia capability, without third party applications to compensate is also disappointing.