HP TouchPad review

This leads to a predictable problem with the Touchpad: while its integrated applications are of a high quality, there is very little in the HP App catalogue as yet. Numbers aren’t everything – both Apple’s App Store and the Android Market are mainly full of utter dross – but there are some apps we’d rather not do without.

The Touchpad has no Spotify app and we couldn’t get the TuneIn radio app to work, but this isn’t too much of a problem as Flash support means you can use radio stations’ web-based players. The built-in Bing maps work well, but the only free Twitter app we could find is the unfortunately-named, if perfectly competent, Spaz HD. Although there’s nothing wrong with the supplied music player and photo viewer, and you can drag and drop files onto the Touchpad in Windows without messing around with any third-party sync software, video support is limited. We found that it would only play a limited number of our test video files and as the video browser doesn’t show thumbnails or file names we couldn’t tell what types worked and what didn’t.

Will software support prove as slender as the Touchpad itself?

The number of apps will increase as time goes on, but we can’t help but feel that as far as developers are concerned the Touchpad will play second fiddle to the competition for the time being. There’ll be plenty of room for apps when they do arrive in the Touchpad’s 16GB storage – we don’t think you’ll need to pay the extra £80 for the 32GB version, unless you want to carry around a large film collection.

Although its current app support is disappointing, the Touchpad is such a great piece of hardware that it does most of what we want from a tablet without us having to install anything. The 1,024×768 IPS panel is bright and vibrant, the onscreen keyboard is easy to use and the tablet itself feels tough and is pleasant to hold. The operating system is mainly a joy to use, despite occasional slowdowns, and once we managed to get videos to play we could get through seven and a quarter hours of films before the battery went flat. With forthcoming software updates to iron out the niggles it could well be the perfect tablet but, as with any new platform, if you buy into WebOS you’re taking a gamble that developers will support the new platform.