Discussion on:

HP TouchPad leapfrogs rivals in productivity

Link to original post:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/hp-touchpad-leapfrogs-rivals-in-productivity/8586

For hospitals than the iPad with it's ability to be docked and used there.

However what's the battery life like? That seems to be one thing that no one is talking about.

Col

I like what I saw with the HP touchpad. The multi tasking feature is great and being able to use word press is big for me.
I like HAL 9000 is very interested in battery life. I used to have an android phone but was hard to get 24 hrs of battery life out of it and with my windows phone (Samsung focus) i easily get 24 hrs (And no I did not root my phone but just did everything else but that). If the battery life is not impressive then I'm going to wait and see if they fix it before the windows 8 tablets come out.

I get bugged on a daily basis by the question "when are we getting iPads?". Could the TouchPad be the business orientated tablet I've been waiting for, let's hope so, there's some very good features in there, the true multitasking is a real benefit as opposed to the in-out way of working on the iPad. I won't be rushing out for a fleet of them just yet though.

Business people typically create documents on the go ... if they do not create documents, at least they comment them ... and want to share their findings.

Jason, I am missing one important point in your review: does the HP TouchPad allow to receive let say a word document, a ppt presentation, an excel sheet, so that I can edit each of these documents on the TouchPad (make my comments or whatever on the go, during lunch ...) and send them back to my desktop/laptop ... with no lost of information (content, format) so that I can or my dear colleague can continue my/his/her work?

Looking forward for your comment

Christian

What can you say about the Toshiba Thrive that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

I am a Apple Mac pro and Windows pc user Hp being my current and past laptop. The iPad does have multitasking capabilities, and is not only made for games and entertainment but one of the most powerful mobil devices on the market. There are productivity apps that allow you to work with documents, spreadsheets, or any other type of project. The iPad has a larger storage capability, longer battery life, and a list of remte apps which allows me to operate my pc or Mac from anywhere I have Internet access with sound from my remote computer sent to the iPad. This allows me to run flash based websites as well as any program on my computers. Like I stated, the Hp tablet is not anything Apple will have to worry about. By the was the Apple iOS 5 will have over 200 new features, one of them being able to send the video of the iPad to your big screen tv!

Kind of amusing that an Apple fanboi claims the ability to remote into a Windows PC in order to view interrnet Flash is an iPad plus point, rather than a huge gaping hole in not being able to do it natively

Sure there are good reasons to leave flash out, but there are also reasons that flash should be available on the iPad. I love the iPad and have learned to deal with the lack of flash, but couldnt they add a knob in settings to allow me to use flash if I choose... for a consumer device that blew up being controlled in such a totalitarian way is rather odd. I know that is how Apple does things, but provide some leeway here sheesh

... I think teacee's method is the most efficient. However, based on Jason's review, we may see a new paradigm in mobile Flash viewing which may drive improvements in Android development. I do understand Apple's anti-Flash arguments because Flash is notoriously buggy on Apple's OS X and I honestly attribute that to Adobe still being pissed at Apple for openly competing with Adobe's photo and video products--especially since Apple bought their core Final Cut code from Macromedia, the company that originally created Flash.

Lol fan fan boi, hmmm if that statement was aimed at me, I actually own more pcs then apple,s yes I use both. And you obviously missed the point. The ability to log remotely in to my pc or my Mac is not only for the ability to use flash even though you can. And if that's your only point concerning iPad vs the Hp tablet is the lack of flash then you obviously as lost as the person who claimed this to be a worthy rival, sorry you lose.

Name 5 software programing products that are dead or soon will be.
1) Fortran (1957) dead
2) COBOL (1959) dead
3) Basic (1964) dead - or soon will be
4 Flash (1996) dead or soon will be
5) Pascal (1970) dead

I did some work in pascal, Basic & Flash, most of us programers have we moved ahead. I would never go back to any one of them. I am now learning HTML 5 and found a cute little apple app called Hype developed by 4 Apple software engineers, a very basic program. Find it at your App Store.

The press headlines about keeping Flash is all about the programmers theyt will need to give up something they charge a lot for. It's a cash cow. And they don't need to have someone trying to kill this off. Flash is old and out dated. If you really need to know the truth and understand whats going on, read this report.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I have a lot of whitepapers in pdf and doc (plus rtf and odt) format and a few books in epub format. Is the reading experience on the Touchpad satisfying? How easily can I zoom in and pan pdf documents? Are they readable in full page or are the characters too small? Does it offer conversion utilities for doc, xls and ppt files?
(I won't mention cbr reader, but sometimes a good comic book is better than a movie.
I found that that zipping jpg scans into a cbr file allows you to see the scanned document in the desired sequence and lets you free to access and modify the jpgs whenever you see fit...)

Call me back when that's released and included in new units.

I'm one who doesn't care about the entertainment uses, but isn't that just a question of waiting for apps to be developed? There are no hardware or OS restrictions on those functions, are there?

Great review Jason, honest and fair.

I too will probably wait at least a few months... an OS update or two will do wonders. HP does seem to be committed to this, and IMO Palm's (RIP) webOS blows away everything else thus far.

Word/excel editing is expected this summer via an OTA update, or as a third party app (QuickOffice I believe). Lastly, Google Docs intergration has been rumored as well.

This may be a good fit for a business user, but only if they do not need their email. If they are in any regulated industry (Banking, Healthcare, Govt., etc.) WebOS does not support Exchange Active Sync security settings so you can kiss email goodbye. This is one thing that all the other tablets do support. That may be this product's Achilles heel. It will be interesting to see

Correctly it is not MS Active Sync but then its not an MS O/S. WebOS is actually Linux based and supports multiple mailboxes through one stack so I can access my work email, gmail and Linked-In all in the same place. It also picks up contact details from multiple sources so will show a picture from Linked-In against a duplicate contact in Exchange.

Everything Jason has said is true as far as I can tell but I think that the HP Touch Pad will definitely be very successful in the Enterprise Cloud. WebOS as a desktop client will advance the relationship between mobile, pad and pc. You can bet the developers will want the productivity that ENYO brings.

Hands up! I work for HP and can't wait to see how this rolls out. Although I'm usually quite stoical about technology, this product line energises me and my colleagues. Don't just take my word for it. Get hands-on for yourselves and you'll love it too!

I am a little disapointed by the review and it only got worse as I got to the end of this. The reason I was disapointed is because it seemed as if excuses were being made for its shortfalls just so that there is a true competitior to the iPad. Although I donot dispute the validity of the TouchPad, it just seems to me that all of the OTHER tablets are all missing something and we are giving these companies a break. The iPad out of the box was ready to go from day 1 with the iPad 1. You could perform any single item task you wanted right out of the box. Now it may have been a lite version of the performed action, but at least you could perform it. These devices coming out now are missing whole componets and still releasing these devices in mass production. Sure they say an update is comming that corrects all these issues but when do we draw the line and say enough is enough. Put out a product worth wild and worth the money right out of the box. Rather than saying give me your money now and in a few months I will make your money worth wild. It's just starting to get a little annoying to me when there has been a standard set by the iPad, (both 1 and 2) and others a failing left in right but asking for our money and wasting our time testing them out just to satisfy non Apple enthusiasts. Our industry MUST force them to do better.

I was a long time Palm user and had many of their devices. I had the Pre when it came out and enjoyed it. I started to falter on it when flash never came to the device. After HP bought Palm, all support and updates for the Pre dried up. I got so fed up with the lack of ability to browse a lot of sites that I dropped the Pre and went with an Android device.

Due to the fact that I have not had any pleasant experiences with HP support professionally, I decided to drop them all together and I doubt they will ever come up with anything that will entice me to come back. Look at the bloatware that add to their printer drivers, that has been an issue at work and for many people I've talked to. Why don't they give you the "driver only" option in their installer? I don't see where the webOS or TouchPad will save any face for them.

I believe HP took the time to make this a decent effort for, to them, a all-new product.
I've watched HP for the last few years and of all the Windows PC manufacturers, HP is the only one who has tried to really use Windows' touch capabilities; no commercial software vendor yet has really done anything with the Windows Touch interface. More, HP's purchase of the PalmOS and taking the time to really try to build it into an enterprise market says they're looking to integrate their touch strategies in a manner similar to Apple's but aimed for a different customer base. I think it can work.

Like any first-time effort, I can understand the bugs Jason mentions--not even the first iPad was perfect--and if HP shows a capability to address the bugs quickly while eliminating the carrier bottlenecks I can see the TouchPad as the first real competitor to the iPad.

My company is looking at ways to implement tablets on our production floor as the amount of paper that managers, auditors and other positions print out to carry around on clipboards is mind blowing. We plan on deploying all of our documentation to some sort of web portal type experience and this would work perfectly for that. Like the author said, it's not going to be big in the consumer market. But we're looking to use it a lot like a clipboard that can dynamically change the papers clipped to it. And access our ERP system without having to walk all the way back across the factory to a workstation.

Remember that Apple was late to apps, behind Palm. Remember Apple was late to the tablet, behind GRiDPad (Note that Apple stole iPad from GRiD) which was designed by the founder of Palm. Apple, always late to the game, always trying to sound like it was the first.

Looks like the Palm folks are going to light up a black turtleneck sometime soon near you.

This pad is DOA, with just under 700 Apps (not optimized for the tablet) and a very poor advertising this unit will be the laughing stock of the tablet world.

I would argue that the iPad / iPhone grew out of the Apple Newton.

I could be mistaken but didn't the GRiD come out in 1989? This being after Apple's own Newton which was around 1987?

The iPod touch was the first of the new technology . The Newton (message pad) was not the template for developing the iPad or any other Apple touch device. Because of Apple's financial problems in late 1997, then-CEO Gil Amelio made an attempt to sell the Newton technology to a third-party, and after failing to do so, decided to spin off the Newton division as a separate company. When Steve Jobs became CEO shortly thereafter, he pulled the newly-founded Newton, Inc. back into the parent company, only to dissolve the group altogether as a cost-cutting measure a few weeks later. If they had the cash it may have developed into something much better. For now we have the iPad, thanks to Jobs insight to the future. With the copying machines at full speed the world will soon be overwhelmed with cheap copies .

What am I missing? Android offerings in Tablets have much more to offer than the iPad.

"There's an app for that". ;D

Fewness? Seriously?

Most want productivity and entertainment - so the suggestion that the Touch Pad is superior to the iPad on productivity fails to address the issue that most execs want to use the tablet for entertainment in their leisure time - the vast majority will not buy two tablets and will end up selecting one that covers both their business and personal lives. There will be some that absolutely want and need to keep these two worlds separate but they in the minority. I agree that Apple can certainly improve email and multi-tasking and other aspects of the iPad but these weaknesses are not enough to offset the huge range of productivity apps that are on the iPad platform. The HP TouchPad is a solid product and a welcome entrant to the tablet space but I don't think it will see massive sales unless that have some services that clearly differentiate the product. I'm all for greater competition spurring on improvements in the tablet market.

I started using HP back in 1975 in high school as we used a HP 3000 Mainframe Time sharing system for the counties school system. Personally I have a HP 6070 Multi media Half sized Tower system. New products have bugs but time solves these things, plus WWW connections make it almost instantaneous. And if you have instant bug reporting you almost do not need to report bugs.

If the users desire the Multi Media feature it will in time get much improved.

I'll give it a year for the bugs to be removed then I'll look into getting one.

Is Jason Hiner is on HP's payroll?

I recently published a blog post article, which might be of interest to people reading this article about the TouchPad, entitled Using Tablet Devices in Learning, Teaching and Education with a focus on the HP TouchPad and the benefits of webOS. Please click here to view: http://wp.me/pFqgC-3S

n/t

I was able to get one of the 32GB touchpad's during the fire sale before they sold out and over all i'm happy with the Touchpad.
The multitasking feature I think is the best between Android and Apple (I support both (No playbooks but just off shoots of Android tablets just as the gTab from View sonic, etc) in my office and have extensive use on them). It' easy to switch between applications, separate web browser instances (cards) and the resuming/continuous playing of the app in the background is nice as well ( and yes to stop the complainers I know that apps can run in the background in the other tablet OS's as well. So just chill).

The battery which was my primary concern is actually not bad. I can easily get through a day of work without recharging the tablet. This is after constantly checking sending email, watching video's on YouTube and even some Skype chat.
I've even left it in standby for a few days without having to recharge it (of course I didn't use it that much during that time either).

The email client is a lot easier to use and more intuitive then the iPad or Android's. I've even shown it around the office and several users agree that going to email is much easier and some even liked the on screen keyboard better then android or iPad's. Opening and viewing word, pdf, excel documents with the touchpad works for the most part. When I was on version 3.0.0 the build in document viewer was buggy. With 3.0.2 (upgrading to which took for ever for the update to finish downloading. I had to constantly keep telling it to download the patch) the document viewer worked much better and was even a little bit faster. For business use I'm quite happy with this.

For personal entertainment it is missing some extra apps/features that would be nice to have such as a Netflix app or being able to use the browser for Hulu. Of course this is probably due to the size of the community that develops for the Touchpad and if it grows (who knows what will happen now with HP's WebOS) hopefully these issues will be addressed. The built in Skype feature works "ok". I've had issues when talking to my roommate on our wireless network. He would sometimes cut out and the same goes for me when I talked.

I did eventually "root" it with Preware. With preware I was able to install several patches that improved the swiping features on the touchpad, email interfaces to much more snappy and not sluggish when moving windows/panes, a feature to have a restart button show up when powering off the touchpad instead of just having a shutdown and sleep mode, and I even installed several utility apps.
I have always gone by the impression that if I have to root a device to make it run better then the OS isn't ready. I've had to do that to several android phones for friends because battery life sucks (Yes even after task killers, me training them on how to kill apps manually and with the latest available android builds). I haven't had to Jailbreak an iPad2 yet but I didn't touch an iPad until the iPad2 came out and by then the development was much farther along then things are now for WebOS (yes there are probably hardware reason's as well, etc but i'm just keeping it simple).

Overall for $150 it's a great tablet and I really like it. Will I put android on it? I dunno i'm going to wait and see what the future hold for WebOS. I may even pick up another 16GB tablet (if HP sells more again, we'll see) and just have that be my android version. I would recommend to people if they wanted something simple and that works to get the WebOS tablet but with the HP situation I of course can't.

I have an Ipad2 Wifi/3G from ATT and just brought home the HP TouchPad that I got from EBay for ??USD,Guess what I am keeping the TouchPad and my wife is so happy that she is getting the Ipa2 Why?Too many apps,too much distractions.The Touchpad is meant for work.Screw Angrybird