HP's Holy Pad takes on JesusPad down under at last

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 26 July 2011 16:11

Your IT - Mobility

HP's TouchPad is nearly here, set to officially arrive on August 15 in Australian stores, with Harvey Norman the exclusive retail launch partner and the rest of the retail channel to come, but shouldn't the Holy Pad have had a few more holes in it?

With Apple's iPad dubbed the JesusPad following the iPhone's christening as the JesusPhone, is HP's TouchPad the Holy Pad to take on the Jesus?

While Apple's iPad has but one hole, being the dock connector, while some Android tablets come with more ports than you can poke a stick at, HP's tablet has one microUSB port, and that's it, much like Apple.

There's no video-out mirroring, no rear facing camera, no camera flash, no SD card slot and no 3G slot, with these being the holes HP's Holy Pad should have additionally come, and which will probably come with some future TouchPad 2.

But it's the TouchPad 1 that HP wants to sell, and while it has managed to beat Windows 8 to the market, it has come late in the early tablet game, with two iPad generations already having come forth from Apple, with plenty of Android tablets and even RIM's Playbook.

Of all those devices, HP's operating system, WebOS, is certainly able to visually compete with iOS, Android and QNX, with the TouchPad even having had 300 TouchPad-specific apps at launch, outstripping the rather poor effort Google made to ensure its tablet-specific app count reached less than 100 at the time of launch.

So, with bits missing and thinner, more capable tablets on the market, what is HP promoting as some of its unique selling points?

One is the OS itself, which RIM seems to have borrowed elements of for its QNX OS. HP, or rather Palm, introduced the WebOS a couple of years ago as a response to the original iPhone, bringing in a much more fluid OS than Apple's iOS.

However, given the inordinate amount of time it took for Palm and then HP to release a tablet powered with WebOS, competitors have all revved up their tablet efforts too.

Continued on page two, please read on!