HP Touchpad announced
HP Palm has just announced a new addition to their lineup to compete against the iPad and the Motorola XOOM this summer, the HP Touchpad. The 9.7-inch XGA capacitive, multitouch screen features a 1024×768 resolution display as well as a 1.2 GHz dual core Snapdragon processor, front and rear facing cameras, Beats Audio, and your choice of 16GB or 32GB variations for storage. The release date has yet to be announced, but for sometime this summer with the launch of the Pre 3 and new Veer smartphones. Details and pics after the jump.
The new tablet stands pretty much toe to toe spec wise with the current iPad weighing in at 1.6 lbs and having roughly the same dimensions. Thats kind of a bummer considering the iPad isn’t exactly the lightest slab of aluminum and glass to hold onto. The Touchpad will feature the new WebOS 3.0 (while the phones are running on 2.3 apparently) and have the Beats by Dre audio enhancements which have been popular in their laptop lineups onboard. Also built into the OS is the Kindle reading software that gives users full access to the Kindle library for books and magazines, and of course new tablet optimized apps from the app store. You video chat fans have nothing to worry about either, HP Synergy will be doing the heavy lifting for your video conferencing needs.
One of the new interesting additions is the Touchstone compatibility. If you are the proud owner of a Palm Pre and a Touchpad, you will have some syncing options available by simply “tapping” the devices together to share information. I’m sure we will learn more of this over time, but it stands to be a pretty interesting feature along with being able to receive texts and answer calls on your Touchpad while the Pre is charging on the Touchpad.
So there you have it. HP, which has dropped the Palm name entirely, and has their iPad/XOOM competitor to launch this summer. Pricing has yet to be announced, but if you ask me, they might be a little late to the game with their summer release. It’s still early, but the difference of launching a product now or by the summer could be huge in terms of sales and market share. It looks like they have a great product on their hands, hopefully it has better acceptance in the market than the current crop of Pre’s.
[HP]
