Apple has dominated the tablet market since it launched the iPad last year. But it might finally have some competition.
Recently, Hewlett-Packard’s new TouchPad tablet computer hit store shelves. The device is no iPad-killer, but in some ways it’s the most polished rival so far.
The TouchPad bears a resemblance to the iPad. Unlike many other tablets that have hit the market recently, it includes a similarly sized and proportioned touchscreen. It has a front-facing camera and a case with a curved back that resembles the one on Apple’s device. It has a home button that works like the iPad’s and has a similar black border around its screen.
Underneath are other similarities. Both run on dual-core processors clocked at 1 gigahertz or more. Both are offered with 16 or 32 gigabytes of storage. (You can also get a 64GB iPad.) And HP is offering the TouchPad for the same price that Apple charges for similar iPads.
But the TouchPad is more than an iPad knockoff. It has its own distinct operating system and some features you won’t find on Apple’s device.
The TouchPad runs on webOS, the innovative operating system software developed by Palm, which HP acquired last year. WebOS has long been a favorite of mine because of the way it merges data collected from multiple sources and for its system that allows you to run and switch between multiple programs.
WebOS includes a feature dubbed Synergy that automatically combines things like address book contacts and calendars that may be stored on multiple accounts. Synergy is woven deeply into webOS. The preinstalled messaging application, for example, allows you to log in to multiple chat applications at once, including Google Talk, Skype and Yahoo Messenger. And the photo gallery pulls in pictures from Facebook and Photobucket.
The other standout feature of webOS is the way it handles multitasking. Open applications are represented as cards, and to switch among them you swipe left or right to call up the one you want and then tap on it. To close an application, you simply toss its card up and off the screen.
For all its compelling features, though, the TouchPad does have some significant shortcomings.
Perhaps most notable is that it suffers from the same problem that plagues other tablets that have tried to take on the iPad: a lack of applications. You’ll find just 300 tablet-customized applications in Palm’s App Catalog.
And while I like Synergy and appreciate that HP has increased the number of services you can connect to with it, I’d like to see it connect to far more. You can’t use Synergy to connect to Twitter, pull up Picasa photos in the TouchPad’s gallery or access Facebook’s chat services in the TouchPad’s messaging program.
If you’re nitpicky like me, you’ll find other ways that the TouchPad doesn’t compare well with the iPad. It weighs 3 ounces more than the iPad 2, for example and is 50 percent thicker. Although it has a higher- resolution forward-facing camera than the iPad 2’s, unlike that device, it doesn’t have a rear-facing camera. Rear-facing cameras can be useful when you are on a video call with someone and you want to show them what you can see.
So, I like the TouchPad. It’s a more pleasurable device to use than other iPad competitors. If HP can entice developers to make more webOS apps, it might be ready to take on the iPad.
But for now, it’s not in the same league.
