HP TouchPad lacks Apple's polish - Boston Herald

The HP TouchPad is another victim of the corner-cutting and rush-to-the-market mentality that ends up producing promising, but deeply flawed products.

At $499 for the 16-gigabyte model and $599 for the 32 GB version, the TouchPad's prices are on par with the industry-leading iPad, but lag significantly behind in quality and features — such as the lack of a rear-facing camera. The current version of the TouchPad is Wi-Fi only, though a cellular data model is planned.

Apparently aware of the tablet's significant drawbacks, Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Palm Global Business Unit, reportedly attempted to boost morale with a memo to his team addressing poor early reviews.

"The good news is that most of the issues they cite are already known to us and will be addressed in short order by over-the-air software and app catalog updates," Rubinstein wrote.

HP doesn't have the rabid fan base necessary to wait patiently for a poor product to be gradually improved. The TouchPad — similar to the disastrous release of the Blackberry Playbook — is being treated like a beta version of a device, which isn't going to fly when consumers have sleek, finished products like the iPad 2 at their disposal.

A bit on the TouchPad's promising parts: The operating system, webOS (which you might remember from the Palm Pre) is intuitive. The task management system is impressive, dictated by a system of "cards" that swipe across the screen. The process for closing a program, or one of those "cards," is creative and satisfying. Simply swipe it off to the top of the screen. Cards can be shuffled around for easy multitasking. The mobile e-mail client is among the simplest and sleekest around, and the calendar allows you to sync with Facebook, Exchange and Yahoo.

The many kinks: Try finding the back button on the TouchPad. It's in a different place depending on what program or app you're running. Touchscreen responsiveness also randomly cramps up or freezes.

Almost straight out of the box, a minute after booting up, the tablet crashed and I was forced to wait again for a minute-long restart.

At first, I was psyched to see the icon for Kindle on the desktop, so I clicked and attempted to download the app, only to be told it wasn't available yet — a sure-fire way to lose customers.

In fact, a stunning dearth of apps may be the TouchPad's death knell.

If it were far less expensive, the Touchpad might be a compelling budget alternative to the iPad. But at the current price and with its current problems, I can't recommend it above even the first generation Apple tablet because, as HP's Rubinstein admits, it's an unfinished product.