HP TouchPad tablet review

Wireless charging. Audio from Dr Dre. An operating system unlike that made by either Apple or Google. HP’s new tablet, the TouchPad, ought to have a lot going for it. It’s even got a magazine to tell you all about the best apps to buy.

It feels solid, albeit slightly plasticky in the hand. At 740g, it’s slightly heavier than an Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab, although perfectly portable enough. But turn on the TouchPad and it’s all about registering for an HP account, agreeing to terms and conditions and generally going through a painfully corporate palaver. Is this as bad as plugging a new iPad into iTunes? Probably not, but it certainly doesn’t feel magical.

Perhaps it would be perfectly forgivable if WebOS, the operating system that HP bought from Palm, lived up to the hype. And indeed there is a lot to like. In many ways the TouchPad rewrites – reinscribes? – the tablet handbook. Gone is the homescreen with icons and widgets indicating programmes or services. Instead, there’s a desktop that is basically just a staging post each of the apps the TouchPad runs. So press the home button and each ‘card’ is arrayed in a line. Swipe up to close or tap to select. If you’re writing an email message, the message gets a new ‘card’ so you can also refer back to your inbox. This is progress, compared to other tablets.

But is it enough when the email app itself takes five seconds or so to grind into action every time you fire it up? When other apps take more like 10 seconds? This doesn’t sound like long, but other tablets don’t keep you hanging around. And is it enough when, inexplicably, the TouchPad decided to duplicate my inbox nine times, offering a range of different unread message counts? These may all be teething troubles. When the TouchPad works, it does work very well.

Indeed, the wireless charging option – simply stand the TouchPad on its stand and it charges quickly and simply – is really impressive. The idea, coming soon, of printing from the TouchPad simply by touching it on a printer is attractive too. This underlines HP’s power to get some things spectacularly right. Take Pivot, the ‘magazine’ that HP says will guide you around its ‘App Catalog’. With real articles and lovely photography, this is an improved way of discovering apps that beats searching through any app store. It’s not ideal for every circumstances but it’s real innovation, clearly inspired by the successful magazines and websites that third parties have produced.
Unfortunately, however, I’ve only seen Pivot on a demonstration device. The TouchPad I’ve been using for almost a week said only that, “We’re downloading your first issue of Pivot”. It never appeared. Even searching via the conventional method, flagship app Amazon Kindle never showed up either. While there’s much to like, there’s too much at this stage that needs forgiving. Even in photos, which synced beautifully with Facebook, scrolling across cut photographs in half until they loaded a little later in the process. It’s not a major issue, but it’s not as good as rivals. Across all apps, the TouchPad needs more choice. The current number - around 300 - is not enough to compare to iOS, but it's more than Google has specifically for tablets.
Indeed, to lure people away from Apple or Android, the TouchPad has to be better. So far, it isn’t, but it has a huge amount going for it. Whether it’s the charging, the VPN access, the easy ability to discover wifi printers – all of this is stuff that beats the BlackBerry PlayBook by a good distance. Yes, the TouchPad feels like there’s something of the corporation about it, but it’s also, in its way, a real breath of fresh air. I certainly want to keep using it, at least until the wrinkles have been ironed out. Only then will it really be fair to compare it to other devices.
Rating: 3/5
From £399