Posted by Eric Torres on Wed, Feb 09, 2011 @ 04:04 PM
HP has officially announced the HP TouchPad, the heavily-anticipated webOS tablet at a media event today in San Francisco. Ever since HP purchased Palm, we’ve been waiting to see what the company had in store for the popular operating system. Well, it’s finally a reality, it’s here and it looks like it could be a contender to Apple’s iPad.
The tablet features a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display and weighs about 1.6 pounds. A WiFi-only version is due out this summer, with 3G and 4G versions set to follow. Measuring about a half an inch thick, the TouchPad has a 1.3MP camera and supports video calls. It has stereo speakers, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, a dual core 1.2 GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB or 32GB of storage. There’s a gyroscope, accelerometer and compass. The tablet will have a 6300mAh battery.
Basically, the TouchPad is what you would get if you took a Palm Pre, blew it up, gave it a higher resolution display, and took away the keyboard. It’s pretty clearly HP’s answer to the Apple iPad: but aside from the dual core processor and webOS 3.0 operating system, it really doesn’t seem all that different from the iPad. While webOS supports Adobe Flash and has better support for multitasking, the OS hasn’t exactly won over the masses in the smartphone space the way iOS has.
Probably the biggest selling point for the tablet right now is how it integrates with webOS on a smartphone. If you have a webOS phone and a TouchPad tablet, you just login with your account information and all of your data will be made available on both devices — much the same way as you can login to multiple Android devices using your Google account info.
But the TouchPad will also let you do things like send and receive text messages or even make phone calls by connecting wirelessly to a webOS phone. The devices work together in other ways too. For instance, you can open a web site on your phone and tap it against the tablet to open the same web site on the Touchpad.
HP also unveiled two new phones today, the HP Veer and the HP Pre3. The Pre3 is the next generation of the Palm Pre, and features a 3.6 inch, 480 x 800 pixel display, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8×55 CPU, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5MP camera with a flash and a front-facing camera for video calls. It supports 802.11b/g/n WiFi, HSPA+ and EVDO, and will be available this summer with 8G or 16GB of storage.
The HP Veer is a much smaller smartphone which HP describes as being the size of a credit card. It has a 2.6 inch, 320 x 400 pixel screen, an 800 MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 7230 processor and support for Adobe Flash, HSPA+, 802.11b/g WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It can also be used as a mobile hotspot to share your mobile broadband connection with a laptop or other device.