HP’s TouchPad – What You Should Know

Yesterday HP (Hewlett-Packard) announced their TouchPad WebOS slate device.  It seems everyone was talking about it yesterday and after gathering all of the information we have all the facts for you and how it stacks up against current slate devices (iPad) and ones that have been annouced, but are not available yet (Xoom and PlayBook).  It seems HP has done away with the Palm brand so we will see if that is a step in the right direction for them.  Read on to see what HP’s TouchPad is all about.

So let’s get down to it.  The TouchPad looks just like an iPad, but you can’t fault HP for that, how else are you going to design a slate device?  It weighs in at 1.6lbs and the dimensions are 240mm (9.45 inches) W x 190mm (7.48 inches) H x 13.7mm (0.54 inches) D.  It is powered by a 1.2GHz Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 CPU, has 1GB of RAM and will come in 16GB and 32GB version.  The display on the device is a 9.7-inch display with a 1024 x 768 screen resolution.

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Other features include a front-facing 1.3 megapixel webcam, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, A-GPS (3G model only), built-in gyroscope, accelerometer, compass and a set of stereo speakers.  According to HP there will be 3G and 4G versions as well as WiFi-only versions of the device.  It was also said that one would ship with the ever-popular HP Beats audio engine.

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The WebOS platform seemed to disappear with the popularity of the iOS and Android really taking off.  Palm…err HP realized this and knew the WebOS platform was perfect for a slate device.  HP says when the device ships it will ship with WebOS 3.0, which up until now was unheard of.  WebOS 3.0 supports most importantly multi-tasking and Flash.  So if you love viewing websites with Flash they will work fine with the TouchPad.  Out of the box it comes with Quickoffice and supports Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net for cloud file storage as well as HP Wireless Printer support.

HP did not show off a ton of Apps for WebOS yesterday, but some of the more notable ones were the Kindle App, which will give you access to all of the content in the Kindle store.  Facebook, the ever popular social networking site.  And Angry Birds, the highly addictive game.

As far as accessories goes there is a case and stand as well as a pretty nifty Bluetooth keyboard.  Also HP has updated their Touchstone dock to allow you to transfer data between your Palm Pre 3 and the TouchPad by just tapping the devices together (think the iPhone bump app).

The WiFi-only version of the device will come first, then we will see the 3G / 4G variants soon after.  No word yet on pricing, we only know that we will see these sometime this summer.

Check out the official product page here
Check out a hands on video here!

Read on to page 2 for the official tech specs…

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