HP TouchPad Officially Unveiled – WebOS iPad (kinda)

HP is now riding the tablet wave with their TouchPad.

It’s difficult to avoid mentioning the iPad, not just because it’s a tablet but because the HP TouchPad and Apple slate are practically identical in size (the TouchPad is 90g heavier though). Both feature a 9.7-inch capacitive display running at 1024 x 768-pixels, and both sport a physical ‘home’ button on the lower bezel.

The HP TouchPad’s screen uses Gorilla Glass which is great as the chemically treated display will shrug off scratches, drops and such but it does also mean that the screen’s finish is fairly reflective.

HP have slung a new OS onto the TouchPad named webOS. The Palm developed operating system came over when HP acquired Palm last year.

Under the hood rumbles a dual-core Qualcomm CPU with a dedicated graphics processing unit. It will play nice with a variety of video formats so that, combined with a wide viewing angle, movies on the move should be spankingly good. That CPU+GPU combo should also make scrolling through documents and app switching nice and slick and there’s even rumours that it’ll cope with 3D games!

Audio should be decent to as, just like the Envy 14 Beats I reviewed last night, it’s loaded with a Beats by Dr Dre sound system.

The web browser has Flash and HTML5 video compatibility so surfing the interwebs should be painless.

Apparently there are around 8,000 apps for the HP TouchPad at the moment but, as every new app store, those numbers will surely increase according to demand.

The TouchPad will be out in the summer in either 16 or 32GB versions with a 3G model following after.

This can only be a good thing as the more tablets on different operating systems will give us punters more choice and there’ll probably be a Darwinian culling of those that are unable to keep up.

What do you reckon?

There’s a video and more pics over at the TouchPad site if you wanna have a peek 😉