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I wrote this up in another forum, but these are my thoughts of the Touchpad:
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Ok.. since everyone else is analyzing and giving their impressions of the TouchPad, I might as well chime in. For background, I own a Nook Color (rooted with CM7), Ipod Touch 4G, and have played with an Acer Iconia A500 for a few days before returning it. I've also used many Ipads (both 1 and 2) and am pretty familiar with them. This is also just my opinion, so don't take everything I say as fact.
First my thoughts of just the HP Touchpad. After I received it, I immediately I upgraded to 3.0.2 and did the recommended preware tips and overclock to 1.5ghz. Overall, the tablet is decently speedy. It is not lightning fast, nor is it slow enough to annoy anyone. In my opinion, the build quality and hardware is good. Not Ipad good, but better most tablets in the $200 - $300 price range I think. The IPS screen is nice and viewing angles are great. The glass feels great. I am a little disappointed in the low resolution (same as the Ipad2), but it's not a deal killer. The plastic back doesn't look very good in my opinion, but it feels solid and does not flex. It definitely does not feel cheap in my hands. WebOS is nice change from Android and IOS. I like the real multitasking which it provides and the swiping UI feels very intuitive. I generally won't have more than 1 or 2 cards open at a time, but I've heard reports of problems if you leave a bunch of open cards. In my opinion, I'm not sure if it's any better than IOS or Android, but rather just different. It does seem quite a bit simpler than Android which I think a majority of users will appreciate. Synergy is nice, but since I actually don't like to tie in all my accounts to the tablet I have not used it much.
The main application for this is the browser, so I will talk about it first. It's a decent browsing experience and fast enough on most websites. I've read online that benchmarks make it about half as fast as an Ipad 2 and half as fast as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and based on my experience, that seems about right. Flash on most sites will work, but on heavy sites, it seems rather slow. I prefer to turn it off unless I actually need it for a site like YouTube. One thing to note is that by default, almost all sites will load the full website on the TouchPad as opposed to the mobile versions which will load on the default browsers for Android and the Ipad. This can be both good and bad depending on your preference. I myself prefer the full browser experience most of the time. Some sites have problems loading in the browser, but most will load fine and I believe most people will not have any problems with the browser. A couple of things about the browser do annoy me. 1) You cannot bookmark a website with an "&" in the URL because it gets converted to "&" which is the html tag for that symbol. It screws up when I try to bookmark the HotDeals page because of this. As far as I can tell, there isn't a patch/fix for this currently. 2) The browser does not "reflow" webpages when zooming in, or in other words, the structure of text will be changed so it will fit the screen width so you do not need to scroll left to right if you zoom in too far. Other than those two things, I think the browser works fine and most people will enjoy the browsing experience. It's decently fast and responsive without too much lag. It would be nice to have other free browser options like on Android and IOS, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
The app store for the TouchPad is quite disappointing if you are used to Android or IOS. It's much smaller and there isn't quite a clear picture if this will change in the future. A lot depends on HP's plans for WebOS which is up in the air at this point. If HP does not find someone to license WebOS and nobody makes any new hardware for it, chances are there's not going to be many developers willing to create new applications for WebOS. Even though there may be a lot of WebOS users now, without an expanding user base, it just would not be that enticing for developers. It would be a shame if HP can't pull this through since WebOS does seem like it has a chance at being a nice OS for regular users. That being said, there are a handful of really nice apps for the HP Touchpad and I'm sure a lot people won't really mind the small app selection since the most important app, the browser, is what this will be used for 95% of the time.
Another option for the TouchPad would be for Android to be ported over. I, myself, would really love to have CM7 or Honeycomb ported over, but I am not going to expect it, since it will still be quite a while before this happens. Even though the development team have made quite a bit of progress, there's no guarantee for a stable release which is ready for prime time yet. I have my hopes, and I think it probably will happen eventually, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I would not recommend people buying this tablet on the assumption that Android will be on this, since nobody knows how long this will take and technology moves fast.
So is this tablet worth $100? In my opinion, definitely. For this price, you're getting a decent web browsing experience, decent battery life, and a small selection of apps. Even if WebOS dies and nothing else is done with it, you'll still have this. Plus, the tablet actually works very well for showing off pictures and playing movies. I would say it's still a great deal for $200 for the 16gb and probably $250 for the 32gb. At $300, it'd be a lot harder for me to recommend given the other choices like the Ipad and other Android tablets. If WebOS had a known future, perhaps $300 would still be a good price, but with the uncertainty of WebOS, I'd hesitate to recommend to anyone at that price. At the $200 price point, this is still nicer hardware than anything else you'll find with Android at this price and it's still a good amount of money cheaper than really nice Android tablets. This may change in the future if Amazon is able to deliver a really nice tablet for $300 or less, but that's still speculation at this point.
In the end, I'll be keeping my TouchPad to use around the house. It does not replace my Nook Color though since I prefer the Nook's size when I'm reading things in my bed and also there's a few apps I really love on the device like the Pulse News reader and Opera Mobile (it just renders pages much faster!). Hopefully, this review is helpful to ppl.
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