The reviews are rolling in for the latest entry in the tablet market, the TouchPad from HP, which goes on sale tomorrow morning. And it’s not exactly blowing minds. Walt Mossberg of All Things D says that the TouchPad, like everything else that’s come along since the iPad, is not the iPad and that it has a long way to go to measure up.
H-P stresses that webOS is a platform and that the TouchPad is just one iteration of it. The company plans to add the operating system to numerous devices, including laptops, and hopes that this scale will attract many more apps. And it pledges continuous updates to fix the current shortcomings. But, at least for now, I can’t recommend the TouchPad over the iPad 2.
Mossberg did like the “cards” interface where you can flip through different screens. Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo liked the cards a lot too and thinks the TouchPad could be great in future iterations but says:
There’s no nice way to say this: Shit just plain doesn’t work, far more often than it should. And there’s no more guaranteed way to make something feel like a train wreck in slow motion than to make it run like it’s a train wreck in slow motion. Apps can take foreeeeever to launch, even with just one or two cards open.
John Biggs at TechCrunch says the device is slow, in part because it supports the resource hog that is Flash, and that it’s not ready for prime time. But he sees hope in the operating system.
WebOS is great. It’s a breath of fresh air. It’s impressively powerful and, judging from some of the apps already written, fairly easy to write and publish for. It’s exciting that it exists.
Meanwhile, Apple is boosting iPad 2 production.
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