14 DAY TRIAL // In a world where tablets are getting talked about more and more, HP apparently decided to start shipping its 9.7-inch model slightly ahead of schedule, or so reports seem to suggest.
When it comes to the tablet market, the competition is, right now, being carried out between the iPad and everything else.
By everything else, one mostly means the Android-loaded ARM-based tablets, since Wintel models haven't been doing too well so far.
Still, there are some slates that don't fit in either of those categories, one of them being the TouchPad tablet from HP, which runs webOS.
True, the product, at the moment, lacks the ability to edit documents, but this issue will be resolved in time.
Nonetheless, the prime worldwide supplier of personal computers has high hopes for it, apparently strong enough that it chose to get it into stores earlier than previously intended, albeit in a non-selling version.
All reports and official notices, thus far, had said that sellers would get it the next month (July, 2011), but it was discovered that the step has been taken ahead of time.
BestBuy stores, for one, are said to already have it, while Walmart received it as well, or at least the demo-loaded version. There is even a video demonstration of the product.
For those that want a reminder, HP's TouchPad is a 9.7-inch device based on a dual-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 SoC. The amount of storage can be 16 GB or 32 GB (NAND Flash).
As for the webOS operating system, it is this software that has not reached the point where it has the full functionality that HP intended for it, causing the impossibility to edit documents, for now at least.
Fortunately, PowerPoint editing will be ready by late summer, after which other formats, like Excel and Word, should follow, since just viewing them is already well within the TouchPad's capabilities.