HP TouchPad Review

I've had my HP TouchPad for almost 1 year now and people have asked me what I thought about it and why I haven't written anything on it

I wasn't planning on getting an HP TouchPad when it first came out. After it came out for a few months, because of the dismal sales, HP decided to abandon the product and sell it at a huge discount ($99.99 for the base 16GB model compared with the original price of ~$499.99 for the same unit).

Even though it quickly sold out in stores across Canada and the US when HP discontinued the product and slashed the price to $99.99 for the 16GB unit, a friend of mine who worked for HP managed to get me one. From what I know, they were allowed to purchase 2 at the heavily discounted/discontinued price.

As of the date of this blog entry, the current firmware/OS on the HP TouchPad is v3.0.5. The tablet runs HP's webOS (which they purchased/got when they purchased Palm).

For me, the price that I paid for the HP TouchPad is probably the highest price that I would pay for it considering that there is very little application support/products for this tablet. I use this tablet mainly for quick browsing to check various news stories, check my e-mail, get PDA (calendar/contact) information, and read my PDF documents.

One of the things that I like about this tablet is that it supports Flash videos so I am able to watch videos from various news sites (CBC, CTV, etc.) on it. It also plays YouTube videos very well.

One of the things that I don't really like about this tablet is that the included Maps program is Bing maps and not Google maps. Google Maps does work on the tablet but this is obtained using the browsing experience and not a separate application. The tablet does support Google synchronization for contacts, calendar, and Gmail which I find to be very useful since I store my contacts and calendar items using Google and it synchronizes across my various gadgets (Android phone, iPhone, Blackberry, & Android tablet).

I find the battery life to be okay and based on my usage, I need to recharge it every 2 days or so. As I mentioned, most of what I use it for is to verify my e-mail, check my Facebook account (maybe update the status using it), get PDA information, and read my PDF documents.

The HP TouchPad charges using a standard microUSB cable but this cable must be plugged into a special adapter (roughly the size of a D-type consumer battery). The HP TouchPad won't charge by plugging it into most standard USB chargers that I've tried.

About 2 months after I purchased the HP TouchPad, I hacked it to increase the speed (overclock it) and disable some features that made my HP TouchPad seem snappier. However, earlier this year, I decided to revert back to using it non-hacked since I has having problems updating the firmware/OS.

I am currently considering putting Android on my HP TouchPad. There is a lot of information/instructions on the internet on how to do this and as long as it is stable and most of the HP TouchPad's hardware (Wi-Fi, speakers, etc.) still works properly, I would prefer using an Android device over a webOS device mainly due to the lack of 3rd party applications.

If you have any questions/comments regarding this blog entry, please don't hesitate to leave a comment in the comments section below. Please note that comments are moderated and any comments that contain a URL link or hyperlink will automatically be flagged as being spam and will not be posted.

Android v4 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich)

I recently received a prompt on my Nexus-S that a new OS update was available for it and decided to update the OS since my Samsung Nexus-S is unrooted and unmodded so I wasn't really worried about having to re-root or re-mod the Nexus-S (and any problems that might arise with rooting and modding with the new OS).

When I wrote my blog entry regarding my Samsung Nexus-S (*HERE*), it was at v2.3.6 (Gingerbread) so going up to v4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) using the OTA (over the air) update was skipping v3.x (Honeycomb).

I've used Honeycomb (AndroidOS v3.x) on my Android tablet so when I updated my Nexus-S to Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), I wasn't sure what to expect.

The upgrade on my Nexus-S took under 10 minutes using the 3G from my provider and I don't remember how many times my phone rebooted as part of the installation but I would say that it didn't reboot more than twice.

After the reboot, there were some updates from the Google Play Store that I had to do (Gmail, Google+, etc.) and this also didn't take a long time.

The interface for ICS is somewhat similar to the iPhone interface in the fact that instead of scrolling through applications by moving your finger vertically over the screen, you now have to move your finger horizontally over the screen. There is also a quick launch application bar on the bottom of the screen similar to what has been available on the iPhone. This quick launch application bar can be customized. To customize it, you basically drag the icon off the quick launch bar and replace it with the program icon that you want. I find the animation when scrolling across the application list "pages" is nice.

I do find that ICS makes my Nexus-S a bit less responsive (less "quick") than when my Nexus-S was running Gingerbread but all in all, I'm satisfied/happy with the update. ICS does take a bit of time to get used to since after about 2 days, I still sometimes find myself trying to scroll through the application screen by scrolling vertically but I would say that there is no real learning curve when going from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich or even when going from Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich.

In terms of whether you should update your device (ex: Nexus-S) from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich, I would recommend doing so since a lot of programs will probably work only with later versions of Android. When Ice Cream Sandwich officially becomes available for my Android tablet (currently running Honeycomb), I will have no hesitation about upgrade my tablet as well to ICS.

I'm not sure if this is an added result of upgrading my Nexus-S to ICS but for callers who aren't part of my contacts, my call log will give an approximate geographical location based on the area code. For area code 514 (which represents the island of Montreal), it will show up as a "Quebec" area code (which I'm assuming is the province of Quebec and not the city of Quebec).

If you have any questions/comments regarding this blog entry, please don't hesitate to leave a comment in the comments section. Please note that comments are moderated and any comments that contain a URL link or hyperlink will automatically be flagged as being spam and will not be posted.