The HP Touchpad was announced just before the MWC running WebOS 3.0 and Apple has just announced its second offering to the tablet showcase with the iPad 2. Both of these tablets look very furnished, their O.S looks very smooth. The existing touchstone technology has been advanced to enable sharing between a webOS smartphone and tablet with touch to share proximity based sharing feature. This sure adds to the Touchstone wireless charging dock of the Pre.
Both the iPad2 and the HP TouchPad have the same display size and the same screen resolution. A slight difference that we see in both these devices is the processor chip, the iPad has a Dual-core A5 Chip which is rumored to be 1GHz, while the HP Touchpad has a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 Dual-core Chip. These both tablets are very powerful and they both are about to be released soon. However the iPad 2 scored on a few points. The biggest advantage being the release date. While the iPad 2 would hit US on 11th March, the HP Touchpad would only reach consumers after June (summer launch). The good thing though is the fact that Touchpad does house all firepower to match up to the iPad 2 or any other tablet out there. It has a gyro, accelerometer, graphics capability, cameras etc.
Another factor is the apps ecosystem, where webOS would again have to battle the App Store and the Android market to make a dent. The existing webOS UI scaled pretty well to make a tablet OS, but thats only good to counter honeycomb. In order to make an impact HP would have top up the momentum to get developers on board. Lets have a look at the specs sheet:
[display model1=”iPad 2″ model2=”TouchPad” ]
It will be great to see some competition between these two tablets and the great thing here is that for the first time, iOS would get a non Android competitor. Which raises our hopes. So is webOS here to take the no 3 spot in the mobile race?
For the ones who are new to webOS, here is a demo video:
[youtube]uwI8QYa3fbg[/youtube]