Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rent injure from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for you if one of the vices that I was looking forward to most this year it is of course the HP Bilt touchpad let's go ahead dig in get to the full review and see if it's worthy of the huge hype that's been bestowed upon so let me recap the specs is very quickly of the HP TouchPad it's got a nine point seven inch and of course that's diagonal display with the resolution of 1024 by 768 it's getting all its power from a dual-core Qualcomm Bilt Snapdragon chip at 1.2 gigahertz so that's 1.2 gigahertz on each core alright so let's go ahead and talk about the OS this is webOS 3.0 and there's a lot to talk about so all that swiping and gestures that you loved or might not have loved about webOS it's all here you can go ahead and swipe up from any of the bezels with the one exception at the top one where the front-facing camera is located but it works anywhere so I've got some open set open up web page swipe up like you saw you can go ahead and access your deck of cards there's also a physical home button here on the bottom of the device when you have it all the way up and portrait orientation which does exactly the same thing so I open this up hit the home button and it'll take me right back to where I was there's not much additional functionality you get with the home button you can use it to take screenshots for example much like you can on an iPhone or an iPad you know hold this down quick button combo it takes a screenshot spit superfluous and unnecessary I found myself never been using that home button but it is there notifications are a bit different they show up in the upper right hand corner I've got a Facebook one that's popped up right there you can see what it is they also show up on the lock screen if you like them too so gonna see what it looks like right there there's notification swipe off and there it goes very unobtrusive I love the way webOS does notifications they really do it right there completely out of the white but you can access them whenever you need to all right so let's talk about this screen the screen here is absolutely beautiful go ahead and open up a TechnoBuffalo image video he absolutely pumps images absolutely pop if you're looking at a website the text is crisp and clear the screen on this is absolutely great beautiful if you were worried about getting a washed-out effect or wording it might look like well Motorola Xoom for example not to worry you going to get a beautiful beautiful viewing experience here on the touchpad alright so now let's talk about the browser since that's where we are right now anyway the browser here is probably one of the best I've seen on a tablet and that goes for any tablet in existence is extremely smooth I very rarely saw that checkerboard pattern from loading pinch-to-zoom was extremely smooth and one of the best things about this tablet is its ability to play flash on a place flash extremely well once again the best implementation I have ever seen of flash on a mobile device let's go ahead and go to YouTube and we'll go to the native YouTube we'll go to the YouTube channel John for Lakers so we'll go ahead and queue that up and it will start playing the video and if you like to browse YouTube videos you can browse them just as you would on your desktop computer that really isn't a YouTube application here because one's not necessary you can use YouTube and watch video just as you could anywhere else and as I showed you at my unboxing it does actually play Hulu or this hasn't been blocked yet from playing Hulu so if you have one of these might enjoy it well last before that gets blocked so go ahead and let it start to play get a second to queue up and you are going to get your video played in New York and get the same controls that you get on your desktop browser you got the full scrubber effect across the bottom and go ahead and make this fullscreen button turn the volume down so I don't make anybody deaf it's a good time actually to mention here Beats Audio speakers they're - located here the audio that comes out of the sound absolutely fantastical it's not going to do it justice to hear it come from the tablet to the camera then upload to YouTube which is gonna sound an average where Beats Audio really comes to play though is when you have headphones plugged in the audio that you get out of this is absolutely outstanding all right so here's Flash playing you can see John kwacha make it fullscreen you get a pretty nice viewing experience stutters for just a second then it opens up in full screen now this I found a little annoying you can't watch youtube videos in any orientation you want you can only watch it the way it wants you to which is like this it's not a giant deal but something that I found very annoying while watching a video you know laying it doesn't have to keep turning around if I didn't have it set up the right way so there is Flash content no stuttering really smooth if you like to watch a lot of flash videos this is absolutely a wonderful choice alright so let's go ahead and exit out of this so conclusion browser pretty awesome so there's junk watch good and pause it and if you want to exit out of a full-screen you have to exit out of it and then you can go ahead and do a pup we'll go and get that out of here also kind of a fun thing too if you want to close an application obviously you can swipe it off the screen but you can also bounce it off the screen which I found to be kind of fun if you have pull all the way down it'll snap right up like that I don't know it was enjoyable to me alright so let's talk about apps apps are important to use apps are important to me apps are the lifeblood of tablets and here we're looking at the HP app catalog and unfortunately there aren't many apps this is the same criticism I had with Android Honeycomb there just wasn't that much out there developers having that that much time with the api's certainly HP is making a huge push to get apps on this thing but there just aren't many right now in fact one of their flagships apps that they showed when they first launched this device or four showed it rather in February you can see something applications right here some of them are optimized for touchpad it'll show up when they're not just won't say for touchpad but I was really excited to go ahead and check out the Kindle Store I was one of the apps that you know they showcase and they first launched it it's even here on the device it's like go ahead and launch it I'm gonna read my books boom thank you for downloading Kindle well hard at work bringing it to you they just give you an icon that takes you to splash screen so it's not ready yet and that's sort of a microcosm for the app situation for the touchpad it's not ready yet it's got a lot of potential maybe I'll have a ton of apps but there just aren't that many right now the apps set there are however there's a dedicated Facebook app for it a tablet which works very well although I prefer the web just native web version of Facebook you're gonna head and have that here and there are some Twitter applications and the stuff that you'd use on a pretty regular basis alright so let me go ahead and jump back to a browser window so I want to show you the keyboard keyboard here's one of the things I really liked about the touchpad you can see it right here and it's pretty standard fare it's a keyboard but what makes it much easier for me lease is having the full row of numbers across the top I never realized how often I use numbers and eliminating a keystroke if I were going to hit a function button and then hit the numbers made it much much easier a little bit of knowing though this tab button the same thing as a tab button on an actual keyboard I can keep moving you down I kept thinking I had a hit tab if I wanted to get like the exclamation mark or something you know that was just me you get access to symbols and it's not any faces and all that stuff I keep words pretty good you can see the letters that you type over it and just works well I've watched a Google but it does you know it doesn't work into keyboard it's got the multi-touch capabilities you know I would have liked to have had the letter should have hovered up as I have my finger over it but it's pretty good and it works well when you have it in landscape orientation as well if memory serves me correct and we first saw this at the palm event they were showing us do you could actually resize the keyboard to different sizes that however does not appear to have made it into the shipping version of this so maybe we'll see that in future updates go ahead and get that guy off the screen let's go ahead and check out email and this I'll use you know palm or HP is now synergy applications or I'll sort of bring everything together its email it works I like you have these sort of sliding panel so you can move things over and get more room depending on what you need or don't need what you want to see it's a very elegant interface and the email just works pretty well on here so it's all I'm gonna talk about that go ahead and swipe that sucka off the screen let's go ahead and talk about just type something interesting here and just type and just type is HP's version of Universal search and it searches universally but there's something funny in here that I wanted to show you so I go and type something it's just type bbbbb and you can search on google and there other sort of functionality you can put in here will hide the keyboard Twitter YouTube and all that stuff but if you look at that YouTube logo it is super pixelated alright so there you go you can see that YouTube logo it is just completely pixelated it's funny that that made it into the shipping build I don't know doing those little things that I want to to point out all right so let's talk about build quality here of the HP TouchPad feels pretty solid it's nice and good in the hands it is probably the biggest fingerprint magnet of any device I've ever used not just the back but the screen as well if I turn this off in addition to the reflection of my overhead fan you're gonna see fingerprints and usually they wipe off pretty easily this one you really got a scrub if you want to clean it all up a package comes in a you know totally heavy by tablet standard 1.6 pounds when you compare it to the iPad 2 or the Galaxy Tab 10.1 you realize that you are carrying definitely a heavier tablet so let's talk about battery life it's got a six thousand three hundred milli amp hour battery life she's a battery indicator there in the upper right hand corner and battery life is actually pretty outstanding I was able to get through three days pretty easily of watching intensive video email coming in constantly battery life was not a problem on her even while viewing video and doing intensive stuff I do wish there was a back camera on here not that I used it very often but I like to have the option to not use it at least this is completely missing any sort of a rear camera it does have a front facing camera but it's really not user accessible there isn't a camera application where you can snap a photo of yourself for example you have to just use this for video conferencing with Skype which why don't we did the testing does not work with the new Mac client so if you want to Skype video with someone who's using a Mac you were going to be out of luck until a software fix comes out we did test it from mobile device to touchpad so from an iPhone to a touchpad for example it worked and from a PC to a touchpad it also worked as well something to keep in mind so let me wrap this all up into a conclusion the touchpad is really a microcosm of HP in general a lot of potential you know there's a lot here the operating system is smooth its slick but there's just something about it that makes you realize you can't use it on an everyday basis whether it's the lack of app support whether or not it's the heavy size you know it's just not something that I think I can use every single day especially at a price point that's exactly the same as the iPad 2 in the Galaxy Tab 10.1 one I was trying to decide what the value-add was for the HP TouchPad so if you want to get a tablet assuming you don't have any feeling one way or another towards Apple or Google or rim why would you get a touchpad and I couldn't think of an answer especially if at $500 price points you'd be much better suited going with an iPad to going with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and getting that sort of more robust ecosystem and a more polished product now maybe we'll see revisions and software updates come up that'll address some of my gripes maybe we'll see developers really make a big push here but I know if I was a developer and I was making an application and I had a choice to write it for the touchpad writer for Android or writer for iOS I'd be very hard-pressed to spend my time writing an application for the touchpad I think we're gonna see really a lot of that in here now if this was $50 cheaper or $100 cheaper I'd say absolutely it's a great tablet to get $100 less than you'd be competing with something like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer and you're gonna have two really good choices but I just can't recommend it for the price I can't figure out the value at is things like the touchstone doc are kind of neat and the touch to share at the pre three but that's not out yet and I can't show you that so you're left with a wireless charging option that's gonna cost you a couple bucks and it's habit what that works well but maybe not as well as other tablets on the market so HP once again it's close almost there but it's just not quite a hundred percent so maybe you'll stay tuned for the touch pad 2 or maybe future software updates but for right now I just can't recommend it to my audience I'm John Rhett endure from TechnoBuffalo do you agree or disagree I'm very curious what you guys have to say and I'll see you in the next video