TouchPad review

Okay, I won’t beat around the bush. The TouchPad looks a lot like the original iPad. Sure, it’s missing the aluminum backing and some of the harder lines, but the general shape, button placement, and size just scream iPad — and it doesn’t help that the screen is the identical dimensions and aspect ratio. There are only so many ways to slice these devices, but it would have been nice to see HP get a little more daring on the look and feel of the general industrial design of this product. Of course, the TouchPad is rather thick — as thick as the original iPad and way thicker than the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 10.1. Comparatively, the TouchPad clocks in at 0.54 inches, while the iPad 2 and Tab both hit 0.34 inches. That may not sound like much on paper, but it’s a pretty hefty difference that you definitely notice when you have the device in hand.

You also notice the plasticky feel of the hardware. The TouchPad is made up largely of piano black, high-gloss plastic. A single piece of this material makes up the back and sides of the slate, while up front there’s a Gorilla Glass-coated LCD display, broken only by a small webcam at the top of the device (in portrait), and a thin home button at the bottom. Along the right side is a volume rocker, while you get two speakers on the left (the stereo sound is a nice touch). The bottom houses a Micro USB port, while a power / sleep button lives on the top right edge of the tablet.

In all, the feel of the device is a touch on the cheaper side of things; I certainly wouldn’t describe it as "premium." Even though the TouchPad has a substantial weight (1.6 pounds), the unit seems cookie cutter (for lack of a better term) in your hands. I also noticed some very slight squeakiness and movement with the plastic around the speaker grill on the lower left side of the slate, which didn’t inspire confidence (though build quality is far superior to previous Palm phones). A soft touch coating would have gone a long way to improving the feel of teehe device (something along the lines of what the company has done on the Pre 3) — or HP could have simply used a better material for the housing. It’s not a tragedy, but I walked away underwhelmed with the design on the tablet — it’s nice to look at, but does nothing to stand out from the pack.

The TouchPad is powered by a dual-core Snapdragon (the APQ8060) capable of speeds up to 1.2GHz — I doubt the tablet is actually burning that hot, but I can’t say for sure. Also inside you’ll find 1GB of RAM, 16GB or 32GB of flash storage (I tested the 32GB version), and a Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n radio. Also onboard is Bluetooth 2.1+EDR compatibility, a light sensor, accelerometer, compass, and gyro, as well as a 1.3 megapixel front-facing webcam. A 3G-equipped version of the tablet is coming, though I didn’t have access to that model while testing.

The speed of the device seemed solid during most tasks, and it certainly has enough horsepower to deliver great gaming experiences like Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. It’s clear the Qualcomm chip is no slouch, but I did see performance issues while using the TouchPad, though I believe that has more to do with buggy code than underpowered hardware (much more on that in the software section below).

The screen is a 1024 x 768, 9.7-inch LCD with capacitive touch. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s pretty much the iPad display to a tee. Compared side-by-side with the iPad 2, I was impressed with the clarity and color tone on the TouchPad, though it’s worth noting that brightness was noticeably dimmer on the HP device. Viewing angles were also comparable between the two screens.

As noted, the TouchPad has a set of stereo speakers (only truly stereo when you hold the device in landscape mode with the home button on the right). The Beats-related sound is quite good when you’ve got the tablet in the right orientation. The stereo field was particularly noticeable with some of the music I listened to on the unit, even when the TouchPad was laying flat on a desk. It’s not going to thunderously rock anyone, but it’s some of the better audio output that I’ve heard on a tablet or phone. In particular, sound was crisp and clear when using the device for phone or Skype calls (more on that in the software section). One knock: when I held the device in portrait, I found that I covered the speaker at the bottom with my hand inadvertently, causing audio to be muffled.

So far in my testing, battery life seems outstanding on the TouchPad. While I haven’t yet had a chance to run our full suite of battery tests on the tablet, I can tell you that in day-to-day, very heavy use, it performed excellently. On a typical day of rigorous testing (app downloads, 3D gaming, Skype calls, lots of web browsing, constant email work, Twitter, messaging, and more), the TouchPad went from 9AM in the morning to 12AM that night and still had 20 percent of its battery life. In lighter use, I left the device off the charger for 3 days straight and still had plenty of juice. HP says that the tablet is capable of 8 hours of web browsing, 9 hours of video playback, and 3.4 days of audio playback, and those estimations seem right on to me. As with the iPad and some of the Honeycomb devices, you won’t be reaching for the dock constantly.

User interface / OS look and feel

The same basic building blocks which made webOS so attractive a few years ago are almost completely intact in the new version. Cards, Synergy, the launcher, notifications, universal search (now dubbed Just Type), and the new Quick Actions are all here. If you’re coming from a Palm phone, you’ll feel right at home… save for one minor detail. In an effort to squeeze the OS into tablet form, HP has removed some of the gestures which you may be familiar with. The swipe up gesture which tossed away cards and brought up the launcher is still present, but the back and forward gestures and the Quick Launcher gesture (which brought up the "wave" of app icons) are long gone. Instead, you get back buttons in apps — which is familiar but not nearly as intuitive. After a few hours of use, I didn’t find myself missing those pieces too badly, however, and it’s safe to assume that most TouchPad users will have never seen them in the first place.

General navigation through the OS continues to be carried out through app cards and stacks of cards, which both work beautifully to create a clutter-free multitasking experience. As I said in my original Pre review, cards feel like "half application switcher and half active widget," and that hasn’t changed much on the TouchPad. Stacks add an even better sense of an overview of your work, and the whole thing flows more naturally than probably any other mobile OS on the market. Palm nailed this the first time, and it still feels wonderful to use.

As I mentioned, other pieces have come along in webOS 3.0, such as Synergy, which has now been exaggerated to encompass all manner of accounts and applications, including MobileMe, Dropbox, Skype, and many more. Likewise, those great unobtrusive webOS notifications are here, though presented in a slightly cleaner (and frankly more usable) manner. They appear on the right side of your status bar and can be managed no matter where you are on the tablet — even nicer, you can manually swipe your way through a stack of email notifications or messages without having to jump into the application to get an idea of what you’re dealing with.

HP has added some new features to the bag of tricks in webOS that make a lot of sense. In the mail app and many other applications on the device, "panels" are now employed to make viewing larger or smaller areas of content easier. That means that in complex programs where you need to navigate multiple levels, you can slide right or left on columns to reveal or hide sections of the app. In mail, you might start out with a three panel view — accounts and folders would be one panel to the left, then your inbox listing is level two in the center, and finally the message you’re reading lives on the right side of the screen. If you want to see more of the email you’re looking at, you simply grab a handle at the bottom left side of that panel and drag to the left, so that the two right-most panels slide over the accounts list. This works again if you just want to look at the email itself. If you’ve used Twitter on the iPad, it’s a similar concept, but here it’s always clear where you can pull a panel back or push it forward. This is employed across the OS to great effect in places like photos, the native Facebook app, and messaging. It’s deceptively simple and feels extremely natural.

We’ve seen a few demos of Touch to Share previously (I demoed it on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, in fact). The technology is interesting if not completely useful right now. As I said at the beginning of the review, I had a Pre 3 to test alongside the TouchPad, and I used the combo mainly to play around with this feature. Right now, all you can really do is swap a webpage from the tablet to phone, or vice versa. That’s nice, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a necessity. The concept of being able to touch a phone to another device and transmit something is interesting, but it will really come into its own when you can share documents, contacts, or images, video, or audio files. Right now, it’s mostly a gimmick (though a cool gimmick).

More interesting was the Bluetooth pairing between the Pre 3 and the tablet, which allows you to not only take calls on the TouchPad when it’s in range of the phone, but also lets you send and receive SMS messages on the device. This is a pretty cool prospect for owners of both units — scarce though they may be at first — and I found it legitimately useful. One caveat: this is text only, so if you receive an MMS on the phone, you’re simply alerted to its presence. Hopefully this will be expanded on as it solves a real problem.

Admission: I’m not really an accessories guy. Typically, I get the bare minimum for a product and leave all the extra baggage on the shelf — but I liked what HP has done with the Touchstone dock and wireless keyboard for the TouchPad a lot. For starters, the dock is fantastic because you can place the device on it in either landscape or portrait with no plug to line up or cable to fiddle with, and that makes throwing the device casually on the dock to charge or just use a much more seamless experience than other products on the market. Secondly, webOS’s Exhibition mode is actually handsome and useful (imagine that!), making for charging sessions that still give you something of value. That fact that this piece of the OS is extensible for developers also raises the bar.

I was also surprised by how much I like the pairing of the wireless keyboard and the dock — together the system feels like a surprisingly functional micro PC. The keyboard is outfitted with a variety of special function keys which can whip you out to card view or open the launcher, drop down your notification window, control the volume, brightness, or audio playback, and pop you into search. One point about the keyboard did bother me, however. When you use the card view key, you can only view your cards or open the launcher; you still have to navigate on the screen. I don’t know why the company didn’t opt for arrow key navigation with return tap to enter the card you’ve selected, as it makes perfect sense.

I’m not sure this combo will win everyone over, but if you’re planning on doing heavier email sessions and the like, it’s a pretty solid mixture of the familiar and the new.