Category: Video

The Best Tablet So Far: The HP TouchPad via Anphase.

Recovered from internet archive:

The HP TouchPad’s is the epit­ome of tablets in 2011. It has the design, the guts and the user inter­face of a true champ. It’s even bet­ter than the Apple iPad because it beats it at its own game — blend­ing ele­gance and emo­tion with func­tion­al­ity. The Touch­Pad takes func­tion­al­ity to a whole new level.

Design

The Touch­Pad is slim and it has a glossy fin­ish. It’s got a gor­geous 9.7-inch XGA capac­i­tive, mul­ti­touch screen with a vibrant 18-bit color and a 1024×768 res­o­lu­tion. It also has a 1.3MP front fac­ing cam­era and inter­nal stereo speak­ers with Beats Audio™. A well thought out design.

Guts

The Touch­Pad per­for­mance is awe­some. Way bet­ter than any­thing we’ve seen on Android 3.0 Hon­ey­comb tablets — that’s the Motorola Xoom and the Sam­sung Galaxy 10.1. It has a snappy Qual­comm Snap­dragon dual-CPU APQ8060 clocked at 1.2GHz. Each core is faster than the proces­sor on any tablet released in 2010 and there are two of them! It is the best per­form­ing tablet yet.

User Inter­face

The UI is what sets this tablet apart more than any­thing. It’s beau­ti­fully done and very well thought out. The ‘cards’ and ‘stacks’ and espe­cially the noti­fi­ca­tions all make for an unpar­al­leled expe­ri­ence. The inte­gra­tion of ser­vices like Twit­ter and Face­book is deep — the expe­ri­ence feels more com­plete than any­thing. I’ve embed­ded a video demo posted by HP to show you what I’m talk­ing about after the break.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnjwG7Z8AM8

UPDATE 2019. I’ve inserted AnandTech’s review from back in the day by Anand himself no less. The tablet was ahead of it’s time. A lot of the features in there are what we see in design now — No physical home button, gestures etc. Oh well.