HP TouchPad hands-on!

In case you haven’t heard, Hewlett-Packard announced its first webOS-powered tablet today. We spent a few minutes with the new Palm-powered pad at today’s event and we have to say, we’re impressed. Design-wise, the TouchPad is definitely not unique. Yeah, we’ll just go ahead and say it — it’s a plastic iPad. Inside, however, we can’t stress how amazing webOS is on a large-form device. The HP rep we chatted with wouldn’t let us handle the device personally, but it looks relatively solid and the contoured edges look very comfortable as well. The only real disappointment we have initially where hardware is concerned is the lack of a video-out — HP’s tablet competition is going to be gunning for the big screen and the TouchPad is completely sidelined with no HDMI port. Software is where this puppy shines, however. The Palm team’s Web-based mobile operating system may have been born on smartphones, but it’s all grown up on the TouchPad tablet. Though the software definitely isn’t final, the UI is was very fluid in the demo we were given —thanks in no small part to the dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor lurking within. Check out our hands-on photo gallery below and stay tuned for our thoughts on the Veer and Pre 3 smartphones.