Hands on with the HP TouchPad

Macworld - I spent half an hour in a meeting, using HP's new TouchPad tablet, before someone realized I wasn't using an iPad. That says a lot about this product -- due to be released Friday -- and not just in superficial ways.

Physically, yes, the TouchPad is the most iPad-like tablet I've seen. Like the iPad, it's a $499 10-inch tablet with a 4:3 aspect ratio. There's even a single hardware button on the front (it's a rounded rectangle, not a circle), a front-facing camera, and a sleep/wake button at the top. It's not quite an iPad 2, though: the TouchPad is thicker, and heavier. But at a glance most people wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Where the iPad has a metal back, the TouchPad is curved black plastic. There's a mini-USB port instead of a dock connector. There are stereo speakers instead of a single mono speaker, and there's no rear-facing camera.

HP's playing Apple's game

The TouchPad's physical appearance isn't the only evidence that HP is playing a different game from most tablet competitors. HP's acquisition of Palm a year ago gave the company complete control over a mobile platform. Like Apple, HP controls the hardware design, the software design, and the app-development platform. While most other competitors craft hardware (and sometimes software add-ons) to house Google's Android operating system, HP has the same level of control over its product as Apple and RIM.

The mere mention of those two companies shows you the different directions in which this sort of story can head. There's no telling where HP's going, but I have to say that I'm optimistic. The TouchPad is a first-generation device that's clearly behind the iPad in a number of areas, but it's running a thoughtfully designed operating system (webOS) that has a lot of potential, both on smartphones and tablets. I don't know if the TouchPad will take the world by storm--after all, no other non-Apple tablet has to this point. But I'm not sure that the TouchPad needs to do all that. If it can just give HP and webOS some momentum, it has the potential to eventually be the iPad's most serious rival to date.

What's good about the TouchPad

From the beginning, many observers of smartphones have considered webOS to be a promising operating system hamstrung by limited phone hardware. With the TouchPad, webOS gets a chance to shine -- and a lot of it is up to the challenge.

In general, I like the webOS interface. It's similar to iOS and Android, yes, but it has some personality of its own. It's a tasteful design, and it's easy to use -- my daughter figured it out in about a minute, if that.

I'm also intrigued by the fact that most webOS apps can be built using the standard Web technologies of HTML and JavaScript, meaning that HP won't have to convince people to learn an entire new development approach in order to build webOS apps. At launch, HP expects there to be hundreds of TouchPad-optimized webOS apps available. Still, the HP App Catalog store isn't exactly full of apps (there will be more than 300 tablet-optimized apps available at launch, according to HP), and the size of Apple's App Store gives it a major advantage over tablet competitors such as the TouchPad.

One clever thing HP is trying: It's created a digital magazine, Pivot, and embedded it inside the HP App Catalog app. Think of an airline magazine entirely about webOS apps, and you've got the idea. It's an outside-the-box approach to encouraging app discovery, and while I have no idea if it'll work, it's certainly worth a try by an upstart platform looking for a way to show off its apps.

This is the first webOS device to rely on a software keyboard, and that on-screen keyboard is a good one. It's reminiscent of the iPad's, but with an extra row at top for numbers, so there's generally less need to press modifier keys to keep typing. The height of the keyboard is user-adjustable, so if you're particularly adept you can shrink down the keyboard and gain more screen real estate. I don't think HP's got its autocorrect system working quite right, because I had to make a lot of corrections as I typed, but in general, I was encouraged by the software keyboard. It would sure be nice to see a webOS smartphone without a slide-out hardware keyboard sometime soon. (There's also an optional Bluetooth keyboard for the TouchPad that is, like all of HP's accessories, an impressive, solid piece of hardware.)

webOS's Synergy feature, which stitches together data from disparate sources into your address book (and really, throughout the entire operating system) is an idea that I wish Apple would appropriate. Apple made a big deal at this month's Worldwide Developers Conference about Twitter being integrated into iOS 5, but just about every service you can think of -- AIM, Skype, Google Calendar, MobileMe, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace -- is available in webOS, and developers of other services can add support via plug-ins. Then the system, as well as other apps, can use that information.

One of the accessories you can buy for a TouchPad is the Touchstone Charging Dock, which wirelessly charges the TouchPad when it's set in the cradle. It's a cool and solid bit of hardware, but the software integration makes it even cooler. Once the TouchPad realizes it's docked, it immediately launches into "Exhibition Mode." Any developer can write apps that work in this mode, which passively projects information -- clock, photos, calendar, Twitter stream, you name it -- onto the device's screen while it's docked. Once you remove the TouchPad from the dock, the apps vanish. And if you have one Charging Dock at work and another at home, the device knows they're different and can be configured to run different Exhibition apps in either place.