The HP TouchPad, demoing a Flash website for Dreamworks.
(Credit: Scott Stein/CNET) It's surfaced at Computex and snuck around the world, but last night in New York marked the first time we've seen the HP TouchPad in its ready-to-go state, a mere week away from its July 1 availability in the U.S. HP had a table with two demo units a Pepcom event downtown, and we got a brief tour and quick hands-on feel of the unit.
HP is promising many of the same appealing page-style multitasking elements and content-consolidation in the TouchPad's version of WebOS that made the Palm Pre so innovative when it debuted. The TouchPad is sleek to the touch, smooth all around and medium-weight to hold, an extremely different product aesthetically than the Windows-based HP Slate 500.
The demo of the TouchPad showed its easy-to-flick and rearrange windows, as well as its app windows. The experience seemed somewhere between the Palm Pre and a Blackberry Playbook. "Full flash" was demonstrated by opening a movie information website and interacting with it, but like all Flash-enabled tablets thus far, there are bound to be limitations as compared to the experience on a laptop.
Most impressive was the TouchPad's photo-browsing app, which consolidates local and web-hosted photos from multiple sources, including FaceBook and Flickr. All photos are gathered in a universal album, achieving the same kind of clever trick that made the Palm Pre's social contact consolidation so compelling. Photos seen from FaceBook even carry over comments. More
The demo of the TouchPad showed its easy-to-flick and rearrange windows, as well as its app windows. The experience seemed somewhere between the Palm Pre and a Blackberry Playbook. "Full flash" was demonstrated by opening a movie information website and interacting with it, but like all Flash-enabled tablets thus far, there are bound to be limitations as compared to the experience on a laptop.
Most impressive was the TouchPad's photo-browsing app, which consolidates local and web-hosted photos from multiple sources, including FaceBook and Flickr. All photos are gathered in a universal album, achieving the same kind of clever trick that made the Palm Pre's social contact consolidation so compelling. Photos seen from FaceBook even carry over comments. More
