Hasta La Gadget!

HP’s TouchPad may not have quite lived up to our lofty expectations, but that’s not stopping the world’s first webOS tablet from going global. UK availability for HP’s 9.7-incher has been revealed as coming on July 15th with all the usual suspects taking part: Carphone Warehouse, PC World, Argos, Amazon, and, of course, HP.com. Pricing is set at £399 ($660) for the 16GB WiFi-only model or £479 ($790) for the 32GB-carrying variant. HP has also managed to get a few content partners on board for this launch, with “exciting, exclusive” material coming in from The Guardian, LastFM, Warner Bros, and Sky News. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading HP TouchPad going on sale in UK on July 15th starting at £399

HP TouchPad going on sale in UK on July 15th starting at £399 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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These six tablets span four operating systems, multiple screen sizes and a range of connectivity features. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

In today’s crowded market, looking for a tablet is like buying a new car. Everything looks great when it’s slick, polished and sitting on the lot. The hard part is keeping track of what’s under the hood.

Wired.com took some of the front-runners from the current tablet field — the brand-new HP TouchPad, Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and others — and stacked up their features side by side in the chart below.

In the wake of Apple’s iPad, which released April 2010, technology manufacturers are quickly churning out competing slates in hopes of luring customers into the new product category with fancy hardware and flashy apps. The tablet market is quickly gaining momentum with a new slate hitting stores every month.

(Speaking of apps, don’t miss our breakdown of software ecosystems, explaining the pros and cons of the app stores on each mobile operating system.)

That’s a lot of info to digest, right? Fret not, tablet shoppers: Here’s some of that info broken down across seven categories.

Body

Essentially, choosing a piece of hardware that works for you boils down to taste and utility. Want something light and airy that won’t wear your arm out while e-reading? Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 has everyone beat; It’s the thinnest, lightest 10-inch tablet out to date, even besting the super-svelte iPad 2.

Maybe you want something smaller, or with a rubberized backing to combat your butterfingers. Almost the size of a trade paperback, BlackBerry’s seven-inch PlayBook would best suit your needs.

Tablets like the TouchPad, Xoom and first-gen iPad all weigh and measure in at approximately the same range, but with some of the recent slimmer releases, they’re starting to look positively bulky.

Power

In this generation of tablets, you aren’t going to see any chips backed by less than 1 GHz of processing power. Our two Android tablets run on Nvidia’s powerful Tegra 2 processor, while Apple’s iPads are powered by the custom-made A4 and A5 series chips. RIM decided to go with a Texas Instruments OMAP, which Palm used in its Pre smartphones. Only the TouchPad clocks in at 1.2 GHz, running on a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ 8060 CPU.

Most of these tablets come with 1GB of RAM to keep things running smoothly, save Apple’s offerings — the iPad 1 comes with a paltry 256MB, while its successor doubles that amount.

It’s difficult to run a consistent processing benchmark across three different platforms, so we’re not going to give the edge to any one tablet quite yet. Still, Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon chip ran smooth as silk in the TouchPad — especially while multitasking — so we’re inclined to give it props.

Frontrunner: HP TouchPad

Cameras

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Shooting photos on a tablet is just weird. Like, “defending yourself in a food fight with a cafeteria tray” weird. Still, we’re all about choice here at Wired.com, and if you want to shoot photos on your tablet, some of these slates can accommodate.

Except for the first-gen iPad, which lacks any cameras at all. Similarly, the TouchPad comes with a front-facing camera for the Skype-loving crowd, but no rear camera for the shutterbugs.

All the rest come with front and back-facing cameras of variable quality, the iPad 2’s being the poorest of them all. The PlayBook has the highest resolutions on both front and back cameras, but you’ll lose viewfinder real estate with the device’s smaller screen. Conversely, the Xoom dips a touch in front-facing camera resolution while bumping up your screen size considerably.

Edge: Motorola Xoom

HP CEO Leo Apotheker has already indicated that he’s totally open to licensing webOS to other companies, and he’s now confirmed that HP has, in fact, been in talks with a “number of companies” about that possibility. Not surprisingly, he didn’t get much more specific than that, and went some way to dampen expectations a bit, saying that “there is no time pressure to do this.” According to Bloomberg, however, “three people with knowledge of the discussions” say that Samsung is one of the companies HP has had talks with, and one said that the company is specifically interested in possibly using webOS for its Galaxy Tab tablets. HP’s Jon Rubinstein also dished a bit more on the subject to This is my next, noting that “if someone wants to really invest, and potentially help develop webOS, we’re interested in talking to them,” although he went on to indicate that HP isn’t interested in playing second (or third) fiddle with a company primarily focused on Android or Windows Phone — it’d seemingly have to be webOS first, but not necessarily webOS exclusively.

HP confirms it’s in talks about licensing webOS, Samsung tipped as a possibility originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In just a few days, HP’s first TouchPad units will be showing off their webOS sexiness on retail shelves across the U.S. — and then heading quickly to the U.K., Ireland, France, and Germany. Canadians (yours truly included) will be able to pick up their 9.7″ slabs on July 15th. HP has done a good […]

HP’s mystery-wrapped Touch-to-share functionality already does something very similar to Near Field Communication, but it looks like the company’s not satisfied with its own tech and will be jumping into the rapidly growing field of companies embracing NFC. A new job listing that has popped up online this week invites applications for the position of NFC Design Engineer on HP’s tablet and smartphone team. Responsibilities include the design, testing, and debugging of NFC antennae and systems, but also expand to “support of product in field,” indicating that HP is working on an aggressive roadmap here. Don’t take our word for it, though, the job advert also advises prospective applicants that they’d have to work in a “high paced, schedule driven environment.” Only question we have is this: since when are webOS devices being produced at a high pace?

HP seeks NFC engineer for ‘smartphone and tablet products’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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