First announced back in February, the HP TouchPad looked like a powerful way to extend the rescued-in-the-nick-of-time webOS user experience onto a hot new tablet. The faithful have waited, and their waiting has at last been rewarded: the TouchPad launches today with the much-improved webOS 3.0, a great set of native apps, and a new App Catalog feature to help consumers wade through their app options.

The TouchPad delivers smooth and snappy performance on everything from games to Web browsing, but it's not without problems; it's hefty and thick, it only has 300 native apps, and many app essentials are nonexistent or available only as phone version emulations.

The tablet's pricing ($499 for the 16GB version, $599 for the 32GB version) means that it's competing directly with tablets like the iPad; a "value" platform this is not. While the TouchPad still doesn't measure up in key ways to competitors like the iPad, it's perhaps the strongest alternative we've seen yet. The TouchPad might do extremely well if it could stop jockeying to be "The Best Tablet" and instead content itself with being "A Great Tablet"... with a slightly lower price.

The hardware: chunky monkey

The HP Touchpad is encased in plastic, with all edges rounded into curves. When holding the TouchPad vertically, a volume rocker sits towards the top of the right edge and a sleep button rests on the right of the top edge—exactly the same placements as on the iPad. A headphone jack occupies the other corner of the top edge, and a home button that occasionally illuminates with a thin white line is centered on the bottom bezel. A micro-USB charging port sits in the center of the bottom edge, below the home button.

The TouchPad's only camera is front-facing, embedded in the bezel above the screen, and is 1.3 megapixels (no camera application is included, so taking pictures or video is out for now). An accompanying pinhole microphone records audio.

The TouchPad has a pull-out piece of plastic on the lower right-hand edge that bears serial and part numbers on its back. HP tells us that this is is a dummy placeholder for a SIM slot in the hardware; the version we have is WiFi-only.













One of the better hardware features of the TouchPad is the two stereo speakers placed along the left edge. They have great volume and sound depth that will be an asset to the tablet in playing movies or music, whether it's lying flat on the table projecting sound outwards or sitting more upright in a stand so that the sound bounces off the table.

The TouchPad leans toward the heavy side of the tablet scale; at 1.6 pounds, it's a third of a pound heavier than the iPad and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but the same weight as the Motorola Xoom. Because the edges are rounded off and the back has a curve to it, the TouchPad feels chunky. Where other tablets might feel svelte, the TouchPad feels a bit like you're holding a blimp.

We suspect the roundedness of the TouchPad is a conscious design choice, and that it was done not just to provide a visual link between HP Pre phones and the new tablet. Rather, it's a concession to the weight: the TouchPad feels heavy enough that if it had any edges, we wouldn't need to hold it long before it would start digging into our hands.

The screen is surrounded by an active bezel just over half an inch wide, and it's comfortable to grip. Unlike the Palm phones, though, the only gesture the TouchPad bezel can interpret is an upward swipe, from the outer edge toward the screen, which brings up the home screen or an app browser (if you do it twice). Other gestures, like a swipe from right to left as "back," may have been left out because they too often happen accidentally while handling the TouchPad.

The screen's resolution is a little disappointing for the TouchPad's size: 1024x768 is the same resolution as on the iPad 2, but similar Android-powered tablets already sport a more respectable 1280x800. We still prefer the iPad 2 and TouchPad screen aspect ratio, but the resolution on the TouchPad means that there are some occasional jagged edges visible on what's being displayed. However, the color balance is nice and the screen can be ratcheted up to a good level of brightness without diluting the colors.

The battery in the TouchPad is rated at 6300 mAh, and is bested by the Xoom, the Tab 10.1, and the iPad 2. But battery life was far from disappointing—we were able to get two days of moderate use out of the TouchPad, with games taxing the battery a bit more. The battery hardly runs down at all when the tablet is asleep, which is great for users who like to leave their tablet around for casual Web or media browsing.

When playing video, we were able to get 7 to 8 hours of video playback with Bluetooth on and the screen cranked to maximum brightness. While playing Flash video, however, battery life dropped to about 5 hours. (Note: the TouchPad has no HDMI or other video out port, no mention of DLNA capability, and no 1080p playback.)

The TouchPad packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, so performance was in general quite snappy. Swiping between cards and opening applications is quick and smooth, and we rarely saw a jittery action from the TouchPad except when Adobe Flash reared its ugly head. The occasional app does freeze or become unresponsive, though, so our experience wasn't perfect. We would have liked to benchmark the TouchPad's hardware, but the usual suspects (Quadrant and Linpack) aren't represented in the HP App Catalog, and we saw no other benchmarking apps available.

Finally, a small thing that gets a big plus in our book: the TouchPad uses the same simple button combination as iOS devices to take screenshots (home button + sleep button). Press the buttons and a lens flare effect appears, and the screenshot is stored in the Photos app. Take that, every Android device ever.