HP Touchpad caught in wild with SIM slot on show [Video]

HP’s webOS Touchpad tablet has escaped into the wild, flaunting its SIM card slot and frolicking with a first-gen iPad. Vietnamese site Tinhte scored the prototype, which hasn’t yet been shown functioning, and dug around in its edge-mounted SIM reader.

Video demo after the cut

The presence of that reader does imply a GSM version of the Touchpad, either on the roadmap for release after the WiFi-only model or – since we don’t know from which stage of the development process this particular unit comes – considered at some point in the run-up to the Touchpad’s launch last month. Of course, since HP is expected to release a Touchpad 3G version in Europe, it will have to be GSM since there’s no CDMA support there.

Otherwise this is the same highly-glossy slate we remember from our own hands-on, though the question is how it will hold up to the freshly-slimmed iPad 2 Apple announced midway through last week. The last rumors we heard pegged the Touchpad for an April 2011 release in the US.

[youtube UGPaaI0f098]



[via Engadget]