HP TouchPad

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.

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) Motorola Xoom -- 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.

Taken from ENGADGET
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