various shenanigans.

A weekend with the HP Touchpad

Manage to score a HP Touchpad at the firesale price from CDW last week. All in All, it makes a great couch surfer and performs well with the preinstalled applications.
The WiFi connection was easy to setup and the standard Browser, Facebook and other apps work admirably.

HP’s WebOs did pass the wife and kid test pretty well. There were no complaints on how to use this thing and everybody was able to get around the device with ease.

I’m not a fan of the crippled Kindle app here. I have books in the MOBI format which are supported on an actual Kindle device and PC app, but not available in the WebOs version.
the pReader (Native) from the Preware catalog does read the MOBI format, but that app is not quite polished yet. I found it a little difficult to navigate those books.

QuickOffice and the Adobe Reader work really well. Spaz HD is a nice Twitter app. ComicShelf works great for cbr/cbz comic books.
I wish the Maps app would cache for offline usage; (maybe it does, but I didn’t see that setting).

The available apps from the HP App Catalog are a little thin and I did run across some that are not configured for the Touchpad; eg. ESPN Scorecenter and the Verizon FIOS DVR Manager.

Battery life was good with moderate usage; a few rounds of Angry Birds and leaving it on all night.

I like this device. Doesn’t really seem worth it at the original pricing scheme with no 3G network capability and no additional memory slot.
I am looking forward to the Cyanogenmod Android port to really have a great tablet.

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