Review by Engadgets
As things get older they tend to get bigger. It's the same for people, corporations, models of cars, budget deficits... and so it is for webOS. As Palm was in the process of being subsumed its great mobile operating system was being eyed for much broader things, far bigger than the little phones it had previously been flashed on. Things like printers and desktops and laptops, but for its first proper foray outside of a phone it has a tall task: compete in the brutally vicious tablet space.
Its weapon is the TouchPad, a 9.7-inch tablet from HP that got official back in February and will be available July 1st (if you don't manage to find it earlier) -- $499.99 for the 16GB model, $599.99 for 32GB. That's exactly on parity with the WiFi iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1, current kings of the tablet court. Does this plus-sized Palm progeny really have what it takes to hang at that price point, or is this just a chubby pretender that's outgrown its britches? Read on to find out.
Its back is black plastic, glossy with a piano-like finish. It's reminiscent of the early, similarly sheen PS3 consoles -- cool to touch and nice to look at, but an astonishingly effective fingerprint magnet. A concave shape makes it comfortable to hold for those of us with bigger hands, more so than the flat profiles of those more slender machines mentioned above, but that comes at the expense of it feeling a bit hollow. The iPad or the Tab give impressions of solidity, of devices with not a hint of room to spare (despite that not necessarily being the case), but the TouchPad feels like there's plenty of space in there for, well, more stuff.
That said, the tablet's dark, simple design doesn't make room for many externally defining characteristics, making figuring out which way is "up" a bit of a challenge. But, get it turned the right way 'round and you'll find a petite chrome power button on the right side of the upper edge. A similarly bright volume rocker lies just around the corner, and if you move further down the right edge you'll find a little blanked-out spot that could make room for a SIM in future iterations.
Continuing clockwise around, a micro-USB port divides the bottom edge, while on the left two inset speaker grilles lurk beneath holes cut from the side of the case. They do provide comprehensively good audio for a tablet, meaning all that Beats talk Jon Rubenstein gave us wasn't completely PR fluff. That said, the sharp ridges left around these recessed tweeters aren't exactly friendly to the hands. No, the TouchPad won't leave you with bloody palms (which would be delightfully tragic) but literal rough edges like this are surprising on a device that's been in development for this long.
Back up top again you'll find the 3.5mm headphone jack on the left side, while a small microphone sits between that and the power button. Around the front is a 9.7-inch, 1,024 x 768 display, matching the iPad and, again like Apple's tablet, that display sits above a small Home button. It's in almost exactly the same place and serves almost exactly the same functionality: push this to pop out of your current app and get back to the system menu, but more about that in a bit.
We're having a bit of a hard time quantifying the performance of the TouchPad because, well, it should be fast with its 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor paired with 1GB of RAM, but too often left us waiting. Bootup, for example, takes 1:15, which is an eon compared to 30 seconds or so on both the Galaxy Tab and the iPad 2. Similarly, we ran our freshly-booted TouchPad through the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark and netted a 3,988ms result. That again compares unfavorably to a 2,213ms on the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and a nearly identical 2,173ms on the iPad 2.
But numbers aren't everything, unless you're a mathematician or an accountant or an astrologist. So, how does the TouchPad fare in real life? Browsing is reasonably snappy most of the time, but we encountered some pages that just seemed to take a particularly long time to load. Our site, full of graphics and Flash, loads quickly. The Gmail site, however, takes ages and ages... and ages. Online video plays in the browser, but rarely well.
Most apps are quick to load and responsive enough, but some, like Weatherbug, are very slow. It's easy enough to blame the developers getting to grips with new hardware at this point, but ultimately we never felt wowed by the performance. Sure, flipping between tasks is quick and snappy, but changing from landscape to portrait is occasionally sluggish and, after about a day or so, we found we had to give it a reboot to regain optimum performance.
We're told that an OTA update is in development that will help to address some performance concerns, specifically with web browsing and orientation adjustments. However, we're not sure exactly when this update will be hitting the airwaves.
Battery life according to HP is 9 hours for continuous video playback, and in our test (WiFi on, Bluetooth off, video looping) we came close to that: just over eight and a half hours. That puts it slightly ahead of the Motorola Xoom but again behind the Tab and iPad 2. Ultimately this means the tablet will comfortably give you a day of serious use, or multiple days of more casual tapping.
As we said earlier, it's a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 IPS panel up front that matches the iPad 2 pixel-for-pixel and doesn't disappoint when it comes to other important aspects of viewing. Contrast, viewing angles, and brightness all impress, delivering plenty of light for bright or dark rooms and angles wide enough to make sharing with a friend a cinch.
The speakers likewise impress -- as you'd hope given the cavernous cut-outs they receive on the side. HP stopped short of slapping a Beats logo on the device but makes no qualms about talking up its branded inclusion in marketing materials. In most ways the speakers deliver, offering (relatively) full sound compared to the tinny mess we're used to. That said, we were surprised to find maximum volume to actually be lower than what the stereo slivers on either side of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can manage.
Finally, webOS on the big screen -- or bigger anyway. The TouchPad is HP's first device running webOS 3.0, a more tablet-friendly version of the little mobile operating system that we've come to love over the years. If you're familiar with earlier versions on perhaps a Pre or a Veer you'll be quite comfortable here because, on the outset, not a lot has changed, particularly when it comes to our favorite part of the OS: multitasking.
Either tap the physical Home button or just swipe up from the bottom of the screen and you'll get into the patented webOS card view, which has been often imitated but never quite duplicated. Each app gets its own card and, should that program spawn a new window (a new browser instance, say, or a new email) that additional card joins a stack. You can then shuffle through the cards in any given pile, drag them around, or just flick them off the top of the screen to send them to the big garbage collector in the sky.
As ever, navigating apps like this is genuinely fun; there's something very satisfying about literally throwing away a window that you no longer want cluttering up your screen or your RAM. And it's all helped by everything in the OS being generally snappy and responsive -- even if the applications themselves are occasionally rather less so. Cycling through running programs and swiping around is quick, but the experience is less gesture-heavy than previous phone versions.
In fact, you'll really only be using gestures to switch between tasks. The Gesture Area (the spot on the bezel beneath the display on webOS phones) is no longer there for things like going back and forth in the browser. You'll need to use the buttons in the menu bar at the top of the window for that sort of thing, which is a bit pedestrian and boring. You can still flick up to get the card view, or tap the home button once for that, twice to bring up Launcher.
The Just Type feature, where you "just type" to find contacts or documents, hasn't been significantly tweaked, letting you start pecking away at the on-screen keyboard to look up contacts or enter in web URLs. It's a little less instant feeling since you first need to tap on the "Just Type" section of the screen -- unless you pair an optional keyboard -- but it's still handy.
Other tweaks include notifications that appear in a top status bar. You'll see an alert should you get a flurry of new emails, and you can quickly flick through them before tapping one to view it in the dedicated app. You can also get quick access to toggling the device's various antennae, and of course get the time and a remaining battery life. There's a screen orientation lock here, but we were wishing for a physical switch as we found the TouchPad to be hugely, well, touchy when it came to flipping from portrait to landscape.
Finally, there's the unlock screen, which looks a lot like what you'll find on Android Honeycomb. Just grab the lock and drag it away to get in to the tablet. The screen will give you some information about what notifications are waiting for you behind the screen -- the sender and subject of an email, for example -- but rather curiously there's no way to jump right to those items from the lock screen.
Email
The integrated email application is easy and effective, relying on what HP calls Synergy -- a means to tie together multiple accounts and show them all in one view. It'll work with Google, Exchange, Yahoo!, MobileMe, and good 'ol POP3 / SMTP out of the box. We attached our Gmail account and, within a minute or two of watching a spinny indicator do its thing, all our labels appeared as folders and all our emails as, well, emails.
This is probably the best demonstration of the moveable panes UI concept that HP is pushing with the TouchPad. By default, along the left you get a list of folders, in the middle a list of messages within the current folder, and on the right a view of the selected message. But, you can tap below the messages list and drag left to hide the folders, making more room for reading, or tap below the email and drag left to bring that full screen. You can then drag back when you want your lists again. It's intuitive and it works -- except when it doesn't, as we'll see in the Facebook app in just a moment.
Ultimately, heavy Gmail users will miss some features available on Android, but this is among the best simple, mobile email clients we've yet sampled.
Calendar
The Calendar app is similarly easy, again pulling in any related Google information should you be using it. Like with email, Synergy lets you sync with many places, including Facebook, Exchange, and Yahoo!, though we found a few selections in the Catalog that bring their own data to the party -- including a Formula One schedule that's particularly handy with all the back-to-back races this season. Ultimately it isn't particularly more or less exciting than, say, Calendar on Honeycomb, but the ability to easily aggregate multiple calendars from disparate sources makes it a useful addition here. At least, for people who have things to do at set times.
The loss of the Gesture Area means you won't be swiping to go back and forward here. You'll instead rely on a rather more traditional looking bar full of buttons. The app will also load the traditional, desktop versions of pages for the most part.
There's no tabbed browsing as such, instead you get carded, each new instance added to your stack. You just tap to get to the one you want, or of course flick the ones you don't want off to oblivion. Flash 10.3 is pre-installed and overall browsing performance is reasonably good, but we did notice some odd stops and starts and delays in loading some pages. Full-screen HD video plays, but not particularly smoothly. The same videos were far creamier on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Once loaded, pinching to zoom is quick and responsive, cruising around pages is snappy as can be, and you'll find the familiar "bounce" effect should you try to drag beyond any edge of the screen. In fact, things are very bouncy here.
Keyboard
Google Maps and Earth are definitely two of the most usable apps on Android; here it's Bing Maps attempting to offer the same experience, and doing a reasonably good job at it, too. The app gives a topographical view to start, but you can of course pop over to a satellite imagery view or the service's Birds Eye angle, using multi-touch gestures to get a good view on that potential vacation destination. (Car propped up on cinder blocks out front? Bad sign.)
You can save locations, view traffic conditions, and get yourself directions too. We're told the mapping functionality has been exposed to TouchPad devs who want to add a little cartography to their apps, but at this point we're not seeing anybody take Microsoft up on that offer -- including the Weatherbug app, which renders its own maps using Google data and, sadly, offers some of the worst performance we saw on the tablet.
We've often downplayed the importance of high-quality rearward-facing cameras on tablets because, well, holding up a big slab of a gadget to take a picture of something is far from easy and equally distant from anything rewarding. That said, we certainly don't hate the things and having one is a standard feature on modern tablets -- and so we're a bit perplexed by the complete omission of a rear-facing camera here.
You do get an 1.3 megapixel front-facing shooter, which at this point can only be used within the integrated video chat application -- Skype. Because of this we're unable to give any accurate description of the capabilities of said sensor, simply because we couldn't capture the output from it.
Wireless Keyboard
Preview
As things get older they tend to get bigger. It's the same for people, corporations, models of cars, budget deficits... and so it is for webOS. As Palm was in the process of being subsumed its great mobile operating system was being eyed for much broader things, far bigger than the little phones it had previously been flashed on. Things like printers and desktops and laptops, but for its first proper foray outside of a phone it has a tall task: compete in the brutally vicious tablet space.
Its weapon is the TouchPad, a 9.7-inch tablet from HP that got official back in February and will be available July 1st (if you don't manage to find it earlier) -- $499.99 for the 16GB model, $599.99 for 32GB. That's exactly on parity with the WiFi iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1, current kings of the tablet court. Does this plus-sized Palm progeny really have what it takes to hang at that price point, or is this just a chubby pretender that's outgrown its britches? Read on to find out.
Hardware
The TouchPad slides out of its cardboard box with a lot of resistance, a precise paper seal creating a vacuum that does its best to keep its tablet firmly ensconced within. Keep pulling and the pressure equalizes, the box yields, and you're granted access to what can only be called a somewhat chunky tablet. It weighs in at 1.65 pounds (750 grams), heavier than the 1.3 pound (600 gram) iPad 2, heavier than the 1.26 pound (570 gram) Galaxy Tab 10.1, and heavier even than the 1.6 pound (730 gram) MotorolaXoom -- which is itself hardly a delicate flower.Its back is black plastic, glossy with a piano-like finish. It's reminiscent of the early, similarly sheen PS3 consoles -- cool to touch and nice to look at, but an astonishingly effective fingerprint magnet. A concave shape makes it comfortable to hold for those of us with bigger hands, more so than the flat profiles of those more slender machines mentioned above, but that comes at the expense of it feeling a bit hollow. The iPad or the Tab give impressions of solidity, of devices with not a hint of room to spare (despite that not necessarily being the case), but the TouchPad feels like there's plenty of space in there for, well, more stuff.
That said, the tablet's dark, simple design doesn't make room for many externally defining characteristics, making figuring out which way is "up" a bit of a challenge. But, get it turned the right way 'round and you'll find a petite chrome power button on the right side of the upper edge. A similarly bright volume rocker lies just around the corner, and if you move further down the right edge you'll find a little blanked-out spot that could make room for a SIM in future iterations.
Continuing clockwise around, a micro-USB port divides the bottom edge, while on the left two inset speaker grilles lurk beneath holes cut from the side of the case. They do provide comprehensively good audio for a tablet, meaning all that Beats talk Jon Rubenstein gave us wasn't completely PR fluff. That said, the sharp ridges left around these recessed tweeters aren't exactly friendly to the hands. No, the TouchPad won't leave you with bloody palms (which would be delightfully tragic) but literal rough edges like this are surprising on a device that's been in development for this long.
Back up top again you'll find the 3.5mm headphone jack on the left side, while a small microphone sits between that and the power button. Around the front is a 9.7-inch, 1,024 x 768 display, matching the iPad and, again like Apple's tablet, that display sits above a small Home button. It's in almost exactly the same place and serves almost exactly the same functionality: push this to pop out of your current app and get back to the system menu, but more about that in a bit.
Performance and battery life
But numbers aren't everything, unless you're a mathematician or an accountant or an astrologist. So, how does the TouchPad fare in real life? Browsing is reasonably snappy most of the time, but we encountered some pages that just seemed to take a particularly long time to load. Our site, full of graphics and Flash, loads quickly. The Gmail site, however, takes ages and ages... and ages. Online video plays in the browser, but rarely well.
Most apps are quick to load and responsive enough, but some, like Weatherbug, are very slow. It's easy enough to blame the developers getting to grips with new hardware at this point, but ultimately we never felt wowed by the performance. Sure, flipping between tasks is quick and snappy, but changing from landscape to portrait is occasionally sluggish and, after about a day or so, we found we had to give it a reboot to regain optimum performance.
We're told that an OTA update is in development that will help to address some performance concerns, specifically with web browsing and orientation adjustments. However, we're not sure exactly when this update will be hitting the airwaves.
Battery life according to HP is 9 hours for continuous video playback, and in our test (WiFi on, Bluetooth off, video looping) we came close to that: just over eight and a half hours. That puts it slightly ahead of the Motorola Xoom but again behind the Tab and iPad 2. Ultimately this means the tablet will comfortably give you a day of serious use, or multiple days of more casual tapping.
| Battery Life | |
| HP TouchPad | 8:33 |
| Apple iPad 2 | 10:26 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 | 9:55 |
| Apple iPad | 9:33 |
| Motorola Xoom | 8:20 |
| T-Mobile G-Slate | 8:18 |
| Archos 101 | 7:20 |
| RIM BlackBerry PlayBook | 7:01 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab | 6:09 |
| Dell Streak 7 | 3:26 |
Display / audio
The speakers likewise impress -- as you'd hope given the cavernous cut-outs they receive on the side. HP stopped short of slapping a Beats logo on the device but makes no qualms about talking up its branded inclusion in marketing materials. In most ways the speakers deliver, offering (relatively) full sound compared to the tinny mess we're used to. That said, we were surprised to find maximum volume to actually be lower than what the stereo slivers on either side of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can manage.
Software
Either tap the physical Home button or just swipe up from the bottom of the screen and you'll get into the patented webOS card view, which has been often imitated but never quite duplicated. Each app gets its own card and, should that program spawn a new window (a new browser instance, say, or a new email) that additional card joins a stack. You can then shuffle through the cards in any given pile, drag them around, or just flick them off the top of the screen to send them to the big garbage collector in the sky.
As ever, navigating apps like this is genuinely fun; there's something very satisfying about literally throwing away a window that you no longer want cluttering up your screen or your RAM. And it's all helped by everything in the OS being generally snappy and responsive -- even if the applications themselves are occasionally rather less so. Cycling through running programs and swiping around is quick, but the experience is less gesture-heavy than previous phone versions.
In fact, you'll really only be using gestures to switch between tasks. The Gesture Area (the spot on the bezel beneath the display on webOS phones) is no longer there for things like going back and forth in the browser. You'll need to use the buttons in the menu bar at the top of the window for that sort of thing, which is a bit pedestrian and boring. You can still flick up to get the card view, or tap the home button once for that, twice to bring up Launcher.
The Just Type feature, where you "just type" to find contacts or documents, hasn't been significantly tweaked, letting you start pecking away at the on-screen keyboard to look up contacts or enter in web URLs. It's a little less instant feeling since you first need to tap on the "Just Type" section of the screen -- unless you pair an optional keyboard -- but it's still handy.
Other tweaks include notifications that appear in a top status bar. You'll see an alert should you get a flurry of new emails, and you can quickly flick through them before tapping one to view it in the dedicated app. You can also get quick access to toggling the device's various antennae, and of course get the time and a remaining battery life. There's a screen orientation lock here, but we were wishing for a physical switch as we found the TouchPad to be hugely, well, touchy when it came to flipping from portrait to landscape.
Finally, there's the unlock screen, which looks a lot like what you'll find on Android Honeycomb. Just grab the lock and drag it away to get in to the tablet. The screen will give you some information about what notifications are waiting for you behind the screen -- the sender and subject of an email, for example -- but rather curiously there's no way to jump right to those items from the lock screen.
The integrated email application is easy and effective, relying on what HP calls Synergy -- a means to tie together multiple accounts and show them all in one view. It'll work with Google, Exchange, Yahoo!, MobileMe, and good 'ol POP3 / SMTP out of the box. We attached our Gmail account and, within a minute or two of watching a spinny indicator do its thing, all our labels appeared as folders and all our emails as, well, emails.
This is probably the best demonstration of the moveable panes UI concept that HP is pushing with the TouchPad. By default, along the left you get a list of folders, in the middle a list of messages within the current folder, and on the right a view of the selected message. But, you can tap below the messages list and drag left to hide the folders, making more room for reading, or tap below the email and drag left to bring that full screen. You can then drag back when you want your lists again. It's intuitive and it works -- except when it doesn't, as we'll see in the Facebook app in just a moment.
Ultimately, heavy Gmail users will miss some features available on Android, but this is among the best simple, mobile email clients we've yet sampled.
Calendar
The Calendar app is similarly easy, again pulling in any related Google information should you be using it. Like with email, Synergy lets you sync with many places, including Facebook, Exchange, and Yahoo!, though we found a few selections in the Catalog that bring their own data to the party -- including a Formula One schedule that's particularly handy with all the back-to-back races this season. Ultimately it isn't particularly more or less exciting than, say, Calendar on Honeycomb, but the ability to easily aggregate multiple calendars from disparate sources makes it a useful addition here. At least, for people who have things to do at set times.
Browser
The loss of the Gesture Area means you won't be swiping to go back and forward here. You'll instead rely on a rather more traditional looking bar full of buttons. The app will also load the traditional, desktop versions of pages for the most part.
There's no tabbed browsing as such, instead you get carded, each new instance added to your stack. You just tap to get to the one you want, or of course flick the ones you don't want off to oblivion. Flash 10.3 is pre-installed and overall browsing performance is reasonably good, but we did notice some odd stops and starts and delays in loading some pages. Full-screen HD video plays, but not particularly smoothly. The same videos were far creamier on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Once loaded, pinching to zoom is quick and responsive, cruising around pages is snappy as can be, and you'll find the familiar "bounce" effect should you try to drag beyond any edge of the screen. In fact, things are very bouncy here.
Keyboard
The on-screen virtual keyboard is reasonably roomy, giving you the full QWERTY experience with a full row of number keys in either landscape or portrait. The symbol key gives you access to your usual array of special characters, though many of the more popular ones are available right there on the number keys as well. You're also given buttons for each of six smiley faces, including, tragically, the sad crying face and, rather more excitingly, the OMG face. There's also a <3 button, welcome addition for the particularly lazy typist.
The TouchPad is quite good at fixing many spelling mistakes and the like, subtly auto-correcting as you go and alerting you when a fix has been made with a small prompt above the word. That's definitely nice, but we do wish the keyboard would automatically insert apostrophes when typing things like "wont" or "dont." HP did, at least, put the apostrophe key right there on the front so you won't have to go digging for it.
The TouchPad is quite good at fixing many spelling mistakes and the like, subtly auto-correcting as you go and alerting you when a fix has been made with a small prompt above the word. That's definitely nice, but we do wish the keyboard would automatically insert apostrophes when typing things like "wont" or "dont." HP did, at least, put the apostrophe key right there on the front so you won't have to go digging for it.
Bing Maps
Google Maps and Earth are definitely two of the most usable apps on Android; here it's Bing Maps attempting to offer the same experience, and doing a reasonably good job at it, too. The app gives a topographical view to start, but you can of course pop over to a satellite imagery view or the service's Birds Eye angle, using multi-touch gestures to get a good view on that potential vacation destination. (Car propped up on cinder blocks out front? Bad sign.)
You can save locations, view traffic conditions, and get yourself directions too. We're told the mapping functionality has been exposed to TouchPad devs who want to add a little cartography to their apps, but at this point we're not seeing anybody take Microsoft up on that offer -- including the Weatherbug app, which renders its own maps using Google data and, sadly, offers some of the worst performance we saw on the tablet.
Camera
You do get an 1.3 megapixel front-facing shooter, which at this point can only be used within the integrated video chat application -- Skype. Because of this we're unable to give any accurate description of the capabilities of said sensor, simply because we couldn't capture the output from it.
Wireless Keyboard
Preview
