I’ve played with the HP Touchpad for a few days. I love it a lot, but also feel somewhat disappointed at it in some other areas. Overall, the Touchpad did not live up to the performance that I felt I’d have liked. But at USD$99, it was a steal for this kind of product.
Booting up
I took this video when I first booted up this machine.
In total, it took the device 2 whole minutes to get started up. Hello HP, this is a tablet, not a PC..
Some of you are already thinking, it doesn’t matter, most of the time the machine will be sleeping, not shut down. Yes, I agree with you, you’ll probably never need to reboot this thing. It’s not an extremely bad problem, but people just don’t like waiting. Besides, a long loading time means it is loading tons of services and applications in the background, and that’s bad.
Screen size
The huge 9.7″ screen makes it very easy to organise and look at information. I might not have liked a tablet as much if it offered only 7″ screen estate.
I also found it extremely easy to type on the HP Touchpad, no small thanks to the 9.7″ huge screen size. I could even type with both hands, so it was really enjoyable typing on the Touchpad. I can never get myself to type on a smartphone properly, especially if I’m walking and typing at the same time. I’m pretty sure I can do that with the Touchpad.
Touch Accuracy
The Touchpad has an amazing touch accuracy. There’s also this ripple effect on the screen each time you touch it, so you know exactly where you clicked on. It makes the tablet so much more fun and enjoyable to use!
Speakers and Beats Audio
With Beats Audio™ in the Touchpad, the sound quality it provides should be phenomenal. Unfortunately, the in-built speakers are too weak to provide any justice for it. And doubly unfortunately, I don’t have a good enough pair of earphones to test the power of Beats Audio. I guess I’m missing out a little here..
Multitasking
WebOS was designed to allow multitasking, unlike current generations of major phone OSes (iOS, Android, WP7). Each application running in the background shows a screenshot of itself, and you can navigate through them pretty much the same way the Blackberry Playbook does. Webpages load even when they are zombified in the background, as expected. When an application launches an external window, it appears partly overlayed on the original application, so there is an implicit grouping of windows by application.
Lag..
No doubt about it: The Touchpad lags worse than an iPhone 3 running iOS4. When navigating through the apps at the multitask screen, you see noticeable lags in the system. The worst experience was when I brought up the in-built Calendar application. After syncing with my Google Calendar, I tried browsing around the calendar. Each flick I made with my finger took 1-2s to load completely, and the animation was choppy (3 fps?!). I’d rather do without the animation. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, since this thing has a good CPU and a decent amount of memory.
Animation
Animation makes an OS feel alive. But too much animation makes an interface look slow, as a user has to wait for the animation to complete before giving it the next command. The WebOS brings “too much animation” to a whole new level: it disrupts the entire system. I was able to close applications while it was still loading, and WebOS would still believe that it was open and continued “running” in the background. Awesome..
Video Playback
… is extremely stupid. They only allow mp4 files encoded in H.263 or H.264 codec. Which practically excludes nearly the whole world of video, except Youtube. I chanced on a failblog video recently on my Facebook, and tried to watch it on the Touchpad. Hmm.. Nope. It doesn’t load.
Integrated Skype
Skype has been integrated into the video call application, so it was pretty easy to set up and use. Since the Touchpad has a front-facing camera but no back-facing camera, I’m guessing that HP designed this from ground to be primarily for communications, not as a gigantic camera you use to take photos of your daughter’s birthday party.
Sadly, WebOS has blown it here too. The interface is beautiful, but the price for this beauty is significant lag when navigating around in the video call app. No prizes for guessing that the rendering of the video chat also lags. In one Skype call with my brother just 1m beside me, I measured a 2s lag from the time he performed an action to the time I saw it on my screen. At 3fps. BAD!!! And finally, remember the animation problems I mentioned earlier? In one of the test calls, I managed to close Skype just before the application loaded, and somehow the call persisted and I could hear the call going on. I managed to replicate the problem a few more times, so this is not a 1-off problem!
System Notifications panel
The notifications panel is on the top of the screen, and is always visible. I like how they packed in the most commonly used features in a single menu, which you can turn on and off with at most 2 clicks.
Notifications Panel
Icons appear conspicuously beside the notification tray whenenever there is a new notification. Otherwise, the panel remains very clean. I have rarely encountered a situation where I saw more than 3 icons at once.
VPN
I don’t have a VPN to connect to, so I couldn’t test the option. This was obviously made to cater for the business user, but now that this thing has gone EOL I’m not sure if this feature be prove any more useful to others in future. Still, kudos to WebOS for having this built into the system!
Facebook App
The Facebook App is one of the most well-designed app in the WebOS suite of default apps. The commonly used features are grouped together logically. When you click on a link in one of your feeds, it opens up the link within the app, instead of bringing you to the browser. This way, you’re working within the application all the time. You will also see some lag when using the app, but overall the well-designed user interface gives it the thumbs-up it deserves.
Youtube App
The Youtube App, unlike the Facebook App, is a complete disaster. This is how the Youtube App works:
- The Youtube App starts.
- Youtube App launches the browser, and redirects it to youtube.com, appended by “/?client=hp-touchpad“.
- Clicking on any video removes the “/?client=hp-touchpad” request, and the browser proceeds to play the youtube video like it would on a browser.
Essentially, the app is just a redirect to youtube.com… I’m not even sure why they bothered to release it.
Adobe Reader / Kindle Reader
One of the reasons why I bought the Touchpad is to use it as an eBook reader. The Adobe Reader comes bundled by default, so it was a nice touch by HP. The Kindle app is also bundled if you chose “United States” as your current country. Overall, both apps are easy to use, although (guess what?) lag is visible whenever you “flip a page” in either app.
Conclusion
The Touchpad itself is a great, sleek, and well-designed device. If HP did not decide to sell off its PC business, this would have been a great contender to the iPad family.
WebOS, on the other hand, is under-developed, but overpolished. The user interface is very intuitive, and feels great in many places, but in many other respects, the OS just plain fails. Video codec support would be one of the biggest gripes I have on the system. If it were released into the wild with enough user feedback, the WebOS with its multitasking ability could take a sizeable bit of the Tablet OS pie. Now we’ll never know.