This is totally our bad. How could we have ever overlooked HP's WebOS platform and the TouchPad? We really must have been stuck in the middle of the desert to not hear the callings. Well, it's never too late... so let us see how the HP TouchPad fares in the ocean of Android and iOS tablets.
It is a breath of fresh air the HP TouchPad. We are so used to seeing the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the iPad 2 that frankly it is easy to overlook other offerings. It might not be the lightest or the thinnest tablet in the market, but what it does is give people another option. A very cheap option. The HP TouchPad comes equipped with a 9.7" screen with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. You also get a 1.3MP front facing camera, an option of either 16GB or 32GB storage and a dual core 1.2GHz processor. So it's not exactly loaded. It is very simple to use and didn't take much time getting used to considering we have never played around with WebOS before. Graphics (pictures and videos) are pretty average for a tablet and despite turning the brightness on all the way, we still felt the display was a little dull and fuzzy. It might not look the best, but you can still do what most people do with these tablets, play games, watch videos, listen to music, browse the web (the built in browser is very good by the way) and possibly use it to video chat. So for your day to day use, it is a good option to have.
This tablet is going to go on our list of ultra-low cost tablets because of its price. You can actually get one (if you can find one) for $99 for the 16GB version. Bet you weren't expecting that from a company like HP. Then again there is probably good reason for that. The TouchPad hasn't exactly been a hit. This is most probably attributed to the WebOS that comes installed. While it is very good at multi-tasking and easy to navigate, the lack of support like the Google Play or the App Store is probably its biggest downfall. You can't just sell a product for cheap and not have the support and expect it to do well. In fact, we know a lot of people that purchased the TouchPad, didn't even bother using it with WebOS, and then installed the Android OS on it. It is probably the most hacked tablet out there! If you are looking for apps, HP has hundreds of dedicated TouchPad apps in its store, and the tablet can also run about 70 percent of the more than 8,000 apps designed for HP's WebOS phones. The phone apps run in a little phone-sized box on the tablet’s 9.7-inch screen, though. Still, it is no match for the big boys at Mountain View and Cupertino.
It looks like a combination of the issues we mentioned has made HP cease production of the TouchPad. Let's hope they take the lessons learned from this debacle and are able to come out with a product that people would want to buy, a la the Envy 15 or the Envy 14 Spectre laptops. We don't feel so bad that we waited this long to test the TouchPad by the way... doesn't look like we missed all that much.
This tablet is going to go on our list of ultra-low cost tablets because of its price. You can actually get one (if you can find one) for $99 for the 16GB version. Bet you weren't expecting that from a company like HP. Then again there is probably good reason for that. The TouchPad hasn't exactly been a hit. This is most probably attributed to the WebOS that comes installed. While it is very good at multi-tasking and easy to navigate, the lack of support like the Google Play or the App Store is probably its biggest downfall. You can't just sell a product for cheap and not have the support and expect it to do well. In fact, we know a lot of people that purchased the TouchPad, didn't even bother using it with WebOS, and then installed the Android OS on it. It is probably the most hacked tablet out there! If you are looking for apps, HP has hundreds of dedicated TouchPad apps in its store, and the tablet can also run about 70 percent of the more than 8,000 apps designed for HP's WebOS phones. The phone apps run in a little phone-sized box on the tablet’s 9.7-inch screen, though. Still, it is no match for the big boys at Mountain View and Cupertino.
It looks like a combination of the issues we mentioned has made HP cease production of the TouchPad. Let's hope they take the lessons learned from this debacle and are able to come out with a product that people would want to buy, a la the Envy 15 or the Envy 14 Spectre laptops. We don't feel so bad that we waited this long to test the TouchPad by the way... doesn't look like we missed all that much.
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