Hands On with HP TouchPad

Last Friday, I saw where you could get $200 off an HP TouchPad, so I decided to jump. I went to the Staples in St. Johns Town Center with my FatWallet coupon and the ZDNet story linked above, and the salesperson treated me like a thief. He disavowed any knowledge of the $100 off deal or the additional $100 off coupon, muttered “Whoever zee dee net is” when I tried to show him the story, and hid in his manager’s office long enough to call all his friends to laugh at the guy bothering to lie to get a deal on a TouchPad. After finishing his giggling, he summoned his manager, who stormed from her office like Billy Martin protesting a call at the plate and tried to lecture me about counterfeit coupons. Most of her lecture bounced off my retreating shoulder blades, though, and I could hear her still protesting as I walked out. I like to assume that her spittle showered other customers.

This bad experience and the TouchPad’s mostly bad reviews very nearly daunted me, but I scraped together a bit of daunt and called the Staples on San Jose in Mandarin. The person who answered the phone quickly passed me to his manager, who also hadn’t heard of the deal, but chose to listen rather than educate. We spoke for awhile, he tapped on a keyboard, and after awhile he acknowledged the instant $100 rebate, and said if my coupon was legit, I indeed would get $200 off. I stopped by Staples on my way home, he scanned my coupon, and I walked out of the store with a 32 GB HP TouchPad for $200 off. I would have saved an extra $100 by purchasing a 16 GB model, but they had none in stock.

I already have an iPad (not an iPad 2), so my children think me extravagant, but none of them understand that I want to try some WebOS development (“Stop the nerd talk, Dad!”). So, I plugged the TouchPad in to charge, fired it up, and entered my personal information to set up a WebOS account and my email. I started poking around, found the Settings tab, tapped the System Updates app, and downloaded the latest WebOS (3.0.2, I believe). It was nice to get the update over-the-air.

So far, I’ve seen both good and bad. The good:

• The interface is intuitive, especially for someone coming from an iPad. I haven’t read anything about how to use the device, and I’m doing email and Web like I’m Marc Andreessen. I can navigate among running apps, change Wi-Fi settings, download new apps from the app store, et al.
• The virtual keyboard improves on the iPad’s: it looks a little better (more 3D), and has the numbers and some punctuation on the main keyboard screen, requiring fewer taps.
• Multi-tasking is simpler: press the home button and swipe among your running apps.
• Closing a running app is easier, though it took some time to figure out. After investigating several paths, I took a shot at just dragging an app up and off the screen, as I would drag an app off the Mac OS X dock to remove it, and that made the app disappear. The first time I tried it, the TouchPad froze and rebooted, but I squared my shoulders and tried it again (after the reboot) and haven’t had problems since.
• One of the top free apps was a workable Twitter client, Spaz HD.
• Angry Birds HD is free.

The bad:

• Rotation twists my patience. A slight deviation from true tips the picture to perpendicular, while slight corrections, or even overblown gyrations, go unheeded.
• The tap area seems awfully small, and I frequently miss buttons and links. My dexterity feels mocked.
• The app catalog is comparatively puny.
• Most importantly, there’s no WebOS version of Ghostwriter Notes.

I’ve downloaded the SDK, but don’t have time yet to do anything with it. I understand you can write apps either in JavaScript or C/C++, so I assume that JavaScript apps are easier to write, crash less often from memory mismanagement, and run slower. I plan to dig deeper sometime soon.

So far, I haven’t seen why someone would buy the HP TouchPad over an iPad, but I’m hopeful that the iPad gets some worthy competition. I understand HP is pushing into the corporate space, a place the iPad lands by default, to IT management’s chagrin (I guess the tools aren’t yet in place for IT to manage an iPad into unusability). For now, though, I can resolve some squabbles amongst my children with yet another Angry Birds-able device. And I can hope Michael Privat ports Ghostwriter Notes to WebOS. Michael? Michael?