14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like HP is willing to sacrifice certain bits of functionality in order to finally launch a tablet that it has been working on for five months, with one of said features being the ability to edit documents.
Not long ago, HP finally made the official announcement of the TouchPad tablet, even though availability is only scheduled for next month.
Pre-orders can already be placed, of course, but this does little to alleviate a certain shortcoming that has only now been discovered.
Said drawback is the fact that the software side of things has not been finalized properly yet, so certain features are lacking.
This is not to say that the WebOS operating system is incomplete or faulty, but it has been found that there will be no possibility for document editing at launch, even though the QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite will be present.
While Excel, PowerPoint and Word files will be possible to view, actually modifying them in any way will not be possible from the get go.
Instead, buyers will have to wait until later in the summer, with PowerPoint editing support being the first feature on the to do list.
For those that want a reminder, the HP TouchPad has a 9.7-inch display and utilizes a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, plus either 16 GB or 32 GB of NAND Flash storage space.
The WebOS is not in a form optimized for large screens (compared to smartphones anyhow), and has what it takes to maintain device-to-device web links, cameras and other features.
HP may have considered delaying the slate further, until it had a chance to fully integrate QuickOffice editing capabilities, but it looks like the world's top maker of PCs is not willing to delay things any further now that rival devices are already out and about, supply issues or no.