Customers waited for the tablet on webOS for a few years. The OS from Palm was too good to be used only in smartphones, and Hewlett Packard decided to be the first manufacture to produce a webOS tablet. Currently the market of tablets is divided into two major categories – the fans of iPad and iPad 2 and the fans of Android Honeycomb tablets. Is HP TouchPad good enough to compete with these two market favourites? Here you will find the answer.
Design
HP TouchPad is very similar to iPad. The dimensions are 240x190x13.7 mm and the weight is 740 grams. This is 140 g more than iPad and 180 g more than Samsung Galaxy Tab. The body is made of dark plastic material finished with glossy cover. Of course fingers leave prints on such body, as well as stains on the screen. The problem of fingerprints on the body can be solved by the protective cover. The quality of assembly is good, no playing between body parts and any crackling.
The device is very comfortable for holding in hands. One of the main TouchPad advantages is micro-USB jack that significantly simplifies attaching different accessories. There are also built-in loudspeakers that provide good sound quality.
There is a minimum of hardware buttons. Volume control is located on the top right corner, power button is placed on the top edge, 3.5 mm audio jack and home button are under the screen. As opposite to the latest webOS-based phones, home button of the tablet is not sensor. The device seems plain but handy, featuring laconic design filled with practical sense.
Display and Camera
HP TouchPad features 9.7″ LCD IPS touchscreen with LED illumination. The format of the screen is 4:3 with resolution of 1024×768, the same as iPad has. Capacitive touchscreen supports multi-touch. The screen is covered with firm protective cover that provides easy cleaning, however, it is far from Gorilla Glass that covers Samsung tablets screens. IPS panel provides wide viewing angles regardless of orientation. The screen looks little yellow, it is not clearly white as in iPad 2. In general, TouchPad screen provides good image quality.
There is 1.3 MP camera above the screen, joined with microphone. HP didn’t place another, bigger camera on the back. And this decision has doubtful sense. On the one hand, TouchPad is inferior to almost any other tablet on the market due to the lack of back camera. On the other hand, the reasonability of having such camera on the tablet is not justified, as very few users make photos or video clips using big size tablets. The feature where a camera is really needed is video chatting. And 1.3 MP camera perfectly suits this purpose.
Technical Details
HP used Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 dual-core processor with 1.2 GHz frequency. This is the same chip that was used in HTC Sensation, but without 3G support. Such powerful processor makes HP TouchPad faster in performance than iPad 2 and different Honeycomb tablets working on Tegra 2 with its 1 GHz frequency. The main advantage of TouchPad’s chipset is asynchronous cores that are able to work on different speeds depending on the system needs. This helps to reduce energy consumption by using processor more rationally.
There is 1GB RAM, the built-in flash memory is 16 or 32 GB. The tablet has 2-band 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi a/b/g/n module and Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR.
Software and Performance
TouchPad runs on webOS 3.0 version. This operating system was specially developed for tablets and smartphones. HP and Palm developers have excellently managed with optimizing the best OS features for big TouchPad screen.
The advantages of webOS 3.0 are its multi-task performance, Just Type feature, messenger and integration with Facebook. The opened applications are displayed as cards on the home screen. If to press Home button, you will see all them on the screen. Each card displays the current state of the application in real time mode. In such a way you always see that a new email was received or whether downloading is complete. It is possible to group app cards as user wishes by dragging them to any area of the screen. If to put one card on another, they will be displayed as a pile of cards. The piles are useful for grouping one-type tasks, For instance, if there are a few web pages opened, you can group them in such pile. To close the app, just put its card away from the home screen.
WebOS offers launch panel on the home screen instead of widgets and icons. The panel can hold up to five different apps by user’s choice. Also there is a page with the full list of all programs installed on the tablet. The interface works fine, but when there are no opened applications, the home screen looks rather empty. Also there is Just Type panel that looks like a simple search bar, but it serves for launching numerous tablet features: search in the gadget memory, web search, creating new Facebook message, new e-mail, chat launch, etc.
When user starts to enter the search request, the screen displays the search results by email subjects, contacts, bookmarks, browser history, etc. The entered text can be turned to an email message, note or chat message. WebOS 3.0 supports numerous communication services such as Google Talk, SMS, Skype, Yahoo! IM and many others. If you enter Facebook account, with the help of Just Type you can create a status message. The third-party developers are also able to integrate their apps to Just Type system. One of the most awaited apps is Twitter that TouchPad currently doesn’t support.
General Impressions
If iOS offers moving from one isolated application to another, Honeycomb is a mixture of various features connected with each other, TouchPad conception with its webOS 3.0 is well-thougth, complete and polished almost to perfection. It is handy and smoothly working device with unique interface, ideally suitable for such screen and tablet size. The main model’s advantage is its software side, while hardware part is not so impressive. HP goes its own way with interesting TouchPad tablet, not copying the competitors.
