Logging in to the machine for the first time does require you to register with HP this, I think we can agree, is now the minimum annoyance that is the price of entry for any new OS. The charger – a solid easel that the tablet sits in – can lie down or be raised, in which case the tablet will function as a clock while sleeping/charging. It uses a wireless charger, an elegant solution to the problem of how you keep the thing charged up (some tablets are very picky about what charger they have, which can be frustrating if you can't identify it from the six or seven that most places have).

The build quality is high – none of the rough edges around the screen that you find on almost any Android tablet (the Samsung Galaxy 10 prototypes that I've seen are the exception). There is a front-facing camera and an oval 'home' button the home button serves the same purpose as on the iPad, waking up the screen or returning you to the 'home' page (which may be a view of your current running processes). Solid but not too heavy, the TouchPad has a 4:3 screen, which personally I think makes a better screen for work, rather than the 16:9 variant preferred in the Android ecosystem, which is ideal for gazing at widescreen trailers of the next Transformers movie. Palm was led, up to the buyout, by Jon Rubenstein, formerly head of hardware at Apple, who oversaw the iPod's explosive growth, and is now, within HP, in charge of the TouchPad and smartphone division.

That, plus its ability to play Flash video, means that it has two things going for it that the iPad hasn't.įurthermore: the TouchPad, for me, stood alongside the iPad in terms of quality – both user experience and build – and made the multitude of me-too Android tablets (and the PlayBook) look distinctly second-class. And I even discovered why you might want to do true multitasking (two programs actively updating) on a tablet – which the TouchPad very definitely can.

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