First look at the HP TouchPad

Yesterday, HP in San Francisco unveiled its new devices running webOS. Among them was the Hewlett-Packard company's response to the Apple iPad, which will appear on the shelves this summer. The tablet is called the TouchPad, and although HP did not allow Wired journalists to touch it, it looks very promising.

Like the iPad, the TouchPad has a 9.7 inch multi-touch screen with a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. Of the features of the tablet can be noted the presence of a front camera for video conferencing and a dual-core processor with a frequency of 1.2 GHz, stereo speakers, gyroscope and accelerometer, support for Bluetooth and Adobe Flash. The cost of this entire farm has not yet been announced.

The TouchPad is powered by WebOS, a smartphone operating system developed by Palm, which HP acquired last year. WebOS has been redesigned and adapted to work on large screens.

The operating system interface “rotates” around a metaphor called “cards”. Clicking on the physical button “Home” opens a screen where all running applications look like small cards. You can switch between the “cards” by swiping your finger across the screen to the right or left. When you find the desired application on the card screen, a simple click on the card puts the application in full screen mode.

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The experience of using cards looks more effective than the process of switching between applications in the iPad, which is to select a specific application from the panel at the bottom of the screen.

HP announces that the TouchPad will support Bluetooth pairing to better integrate the tablet with smartphones running webOS. For example, if you receive a phone call to a webOS phone, you can synchronize it with the tablet to answer the caller using the TouchPad. The same applies to sent and received text messages.


Other personal data, such as photos and calendar entries, will be synchronized between webOS devices using an online system called Synergy. Using your account in this service, you can see your data on any device running webOS.


It remains to wait a little bit when HP allows you to “touch” your tablet so that you can make a full review.