HP TouchPad Wi-Fi 32 GB

 With all the attention lavished upon would-be tablet competitors to the Apple iPad, like the Motorola Xoom ($599, 3.5 stars) and the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook ($499, 3 stars), HP's webOS-based TouchPad has mostly flown under the radar. That should change rather quickly, though. HP, which has allegedly been designing the TouchPad since day one of its Palm acquisition more than a year ago, did something rare: The company waited until the product was ready to release it. The TouchPad is the antithesis of the PlayBook or the Xoom, which were both initially released with major features missing. The TouchPad, on the other hand, is a fully formed, well-conceived, well-designed tablet with a graceful operating system, and a unique approach to multitasking, and it comes with all of its features activated. There's room for improvement—a wider app selection and a rear-facing camera would've been nice—but the TouchPad offers a more enjoyable user experience than any of the current wave of Android Honeycomb tablets. It's no iPad, but it's the best non-Apple tablet we've seen yet.



Measuring 7.5 by 9.5 by 0.6 inches, the TouchPad is almost twice as thick as the iPad 2, but otherwise similar in its dimensions and display size. The 9.7-inch, 1,024-by-768-pixel touch-screen LCD matches the iPad's size and resolution. And it has the same 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than the longer and thinner 16:9 screen many tablets, like the Motorola Xoom, use. The display is surrounded by a logo-free, flat black bezel, which also houses the front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera lens up top and the Home button below. The glossy black plastic on the back panel attracts fingerprints and features little more than the HP logo—there is no rear-facing camera. Rounded side panels house the few controls and connections on the tablet: a Power/Wake button, Volume controls, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a micro USB connection for the syncing/charging cable. There's also a pair of integrated stereo speakers. It's nice that there is stereo separation here, but, as is typical with tablet speakers, they don't sound great very good. Also typical (and unfortunate): The TouchPad doesn't come with earphones, but you do get a cleaning cloth and a USB sync cable that plugs into the included wall charger.
As far as what's under the hood, the TouchPad is the first tablet we've tested built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 1.2GHz processor. All Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets thus far have used Nvidia's dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2. At 1.2GHz, the Qualcomm processor is more powerful in theory, but there aren't any benchmark apps like the ones we use to test Android tablets right now, so there's no way to prove this. In actual use, there wasn't an obvious processor performance difference between the TouchPad and other Honeycomb tablets. (More on overall performance in a minute.) The TouchPad also integrates 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR.

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