Wednesday, February 9, 2011

iPad 2 and HP TouchPad - Tablet News Roundup


The Wall Street Journal has a story that the iPad 2 has gone into production. No real surprises, but it is to be smaller, thinner and faster than the original model, with at least one camera (front-facing for FaceTime). It is expected to be available on both Verizon and AT&T in it's 3G version at launch. Yawn.



HP announced their new tablet today, the HP TouchPad.  It is the same size and resolution as the iPad, and runs the dual-core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon processor - which should provide plenty of horsepower.  The TouchPad has 1Gb of RAM, as opposed to iPad's 256Mb - multitasking on the HP should be smooth and quick.  Storage will be in 16Gb and 32Gb flash options - just like the iPad.  The TouchPad is WiFi-only, and does have a front-facing camera.  It does include wireless charging ("TouchStone"), Micro-USB (for charging and syncing only) and no SD card support.  The biggest part of the announcement - the TouchPad will run WebOS, which HP picked up when they acquired Palm - this means Adobe Flash support.  Availability is sometime summer - no pricing yet.  It sounds like it will be very close in features to iPad 2, and released at the same time - without the huge App Store.  The price tag will have to be pretty attractive, or WebOS unbelieveably user-friendly for this to be a horse race.

Finally, TechCrunch has a wild rumor that Apple is readying a "Fall Surprise" - the iPad 3 (or at least 2.5), giving them a chance to refresh and reload prior to the holiday season.  Sounds kind of out there, but time will tell...

2 comments:

  1. Does the HP have any kind of stylus support? For graphics apps (drawing comics, in particular) these devices seem like a nice improvement from really expensive and bulkier tablet computers, but they don't seem built for producing stuff. What product, not made by Wacom (so cheaper and more multi-use than a Wacom), would fit this best?

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  2. The pen is not in vogue on the tablet front these days, and I have not seen any word of pen support for the TouchPad, but I was playing with an HP Slate running Windows 7 today (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hp-slate-500-tablet-pc-yours-for-799/10111), which does sport a pen interface. Even as a former pen addict, I wasn't very impressed with the responsiveness on this one. I have also played around with the Pogo Pen for the iPad - definitely not what you are looking for. I haven't seen any pen-based Android tablets yet, but with so many hitting the market, there may be an option there.

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