Just got my paws on this awesome TouchPad for 99 clams. Yes, 99 clams. That ain’t a typo.
First of all, I want to give a word of thanks to Mr. Apotheker. Yes, his decision to clean out these babies at fire sale prices has cost him his job. But let's look on the bright side. He’s walking away with a multi-million dollar golden parachute, so I consider this entire affair a win-win situation. I guess the only people who got a raw deal in this whole thing are HP shareholders. But that’s okay. By now, they have gotten used to getting shafted by HP’s board and management.
So, some thoughts on this product, and how it compares to its arch-nemesis, the iPad2.
For starters, multi-tasking is MUCH better than iPad2. This is not surprising, considering that the OS is designed for this sort of thing, and the hardware packs twice as much DRAM. The UI can only be described as top notch, easily allowing the user to open/shut down apps and cycling through them.
That said, superior multi-tasking isn’t enough to offset a long list of deficiencies. So, let’s start bitchin’
1. The hardware just isn’t as sexy as an iPad2
i. The body is thicker and heavier than iPad2
ii. The back is made of plastic, and it feels cheap. The iPad2’s brushed aluminum back, by contrast, feels downright luxurious.
iii. The exterior buttons and switches require a bit of effort to press, which adds to the cheap-feel quotient.
iv. What else can I say? It just doesn’t look as good.
2. The browser isn’t as good as Mobile Safari
i. For some odd reason, it feels decidedly un-smooth. Not jerky per se, but when you are scrolling up and down a webpage, you just don’t get the kind of fluidity you get with Mobile Safari. It feels kinda like a 300MHz Celeron running IE6 with the “smooth scrolling” option enabled. Passable, but far from great.
ii. Text isn’t correctly rendered. When viewing websites in portrait orientation, almost all text look ugly.
iii. Some websites load VERY slowly.
iv. Embedded videos run weird, and they look ugly, too.
3. Kindle (admittedly in beta) isn’t as smooth as the iOS version. The page turning animation is atrocious. There are also some annoying UI bugs.
4. There is no Chinese language support, meaning the user cannot input Chinese characters. As a matter of fact, only five languages are currently supported.
5. It takes a little while to change from one orientation to another, i.e. portrait to landscape, and vice versa.
6. The bundled apps are not as good as their iOS counterparts in general, i.e. the image viewer is slow and buggy. Same goes for the PDF reader.
None of these shortcomings are deal-breakers, mind you. If you give Jon Rubinstein enough time, there is no reason why the experience cannot be improved to match or surpass the iPad2. However, HP has committed the sin of releasing a product before it is ready for prime time. Given the stiff competition, it’s no wonder the Touchpad got killed in the market.
What a shame. If I ever become the Lord of the Universe, it is my intention to sign the following into law: if you are late to the party, your product has to be BETTER AND/OR CHEAPER than the incumbent. Failure to comply shall be punishable by massive financial hemorrhage and loss of prestige. Yeah, I’ll bet Apotheker is now thinking to himself, “Man, if Tom was LOTU when the project got kicked off, we would not be in this mess.”
But in the grand scheme of things, I can overlook a lot of negative things for 99 bucks. If the product is cheap enough, see, I am willing to forgive a lot of stuff. Going forward, there is a rumor circulating that Amazon will take WebOS off HP’s hand. If so, then one day, in the not-too-distant future, the TouchPad will rise from the netherworld of dead tech and be resurrected as the Amazon Kindle Inferno.
That, would be very, very cool.
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