With all the attention lavished upon would-be tablet competitors to the Apple iPad, like the Motorola Xoom ($599, 3.5 stars) and the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook ($499, 3 stars), HP's webOS-based TouchPad has mostly flown under the radar. That should change rather quickly, though. HP, which has allegedly been designing the TouchPad since day one of its Palm acquisition more than a year ago, did something rare: The company waited until the product was ready to release it. The TouchPad is the antithesis of the PlayBook or the Xoom, which were both initially released with major features missing. The TouchPad, on the other hand, is a fully formed, well-conceived, well-designed tablet with a graceful operating system, and a unique approach to multitasking, and it comes with all of its features activated. There's room for improvement—a wider app selection and a rear-facing camera would've been nice—but the TouchPad offers a more enjoyable user experience than any of the current wave of Android Honeycomb tablets. It's no iPad, but it's the best non-Apple tablet we've seen yet.

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Editor's Note: This review was updated on August 2, 2011 to reflect software updates since the tablet's launch.

Pricing, DesignCurrently, the TouchPad is available with Wi-Fi only (16GB, $499 or 32GB, $599). HP says the tablet will eventually be offered on AT&T, but connectivity details, pricing, and timing have yet to be announced.

Measuring 7.5 by 9.5 by 0.6 inches, the TouchPad is almost twice as thick as the iPad 2, but otherwise similar in its dimensions and display size. The 9.7-inch, 1,024-by-768-pixel touch-screen LCD matches the iPad's size and resolution. And it has the same 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than the longer and thinner 16:9 screen many tablets, like the Motorola Xoom, use. The display is surrounded by a logo-free, flat black bezel, which also houses the front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera lens up top and the Home button below. The glossy black plastic on the back panel attracts fingerprints and features little more than the HP logo—there is no rear-facing camera. Rounded side panels house the few controls and connections on the tablet: a Power/Wake button, Volume controls, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a micro USB connection for the syncing/charging cable. There's also a pair of integrated stereo speakers. It's nice that there is stereo separation here, but, as is typical with tablet speakers, they don't sound great very good. Also typical (and unfortunate): The TouchPad doesn't come with earphones, but you do get a cleaning cloth and a USB sync cable that plugs into the included wall charger.

As far as what's under the hood, the TouchPad is the first tablet we've tested built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 1.2GHz processor. All Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets thus far have used Nvidia's dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2. At 1.2GHz, the Qualcomm processor is more powerful in theory, but there aren't any benchmark apps like the ones we use to test Android tablets right now, so there's no way to prove this. In actual use, there wasn't an obvious processor performance difference between the TouchPad and other Honeycomb tablets. (More on overall performance in a minute.) The TouchPad also integrates 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR.

WebOS 3.0
HP's webOS 3.0 takes an original approach to multitasking, and this functionality is at the core of the TouchPad's impressive user interface. Everything—apps, browser windows, videos, photos, and more—can be minimized to "card" size with a downward swipe or a tap on the Home button. When in card-viewing mode (which is how the home screen is configured), you scroll through live thumbnails of every app, window, or file you have open. If you want to close an app, just flick the card upward, and it flies off your screen.

A quick note: HP released an update to the TouchPad, webOS 3.0.2, in early August. The update fixed a number of minor performance issues, like lags in autocorrection and in scrolling. It also improved, slightly, the TouchPad's HTML5 video playback (more on that below). It didn't, however, do much to solve the TouchPad's two primary performance issues: applications that take several seconds to load, and a significant lag when rotating the device between portrait and landscape modes. These issues seem to be software- rather than hardware-related, and HP will hopefully fix them in future software updates.

The home screen/multi-tasking card view is by itself a smart way of dealing with the tablet's simultaneous functions, but the stacking feature is one of webOS's more useful tricks. If you're browsing multiple windows online, they can either be shown next to each other for easy scrolling, or be stacked on top of each other. All of this is done with simple swipes, and it's hard to accidentally stack or unstack cards. Any card can be stacked with any other card, and stacking a photo with a note, an email message, and a Web page is dead-simple. Apple's iOS allows for grouping apps into folders, but all you see in these folders is icons representing the apps you put in them. In webOS, you see whatever the actual window is showing. If you have a presentation you're working on and you need to do research online and organize some photos for it, all of these different windows—the photos, the Word docs, the websites—can all sit in one tidy stack. It's easily the best multitasking layout we've seen in a tablet OS thus far. On a Honeycomb tablet, you see (very) minimized snapshots of your open apps in the multitasking bar. In webOS, the cards are large enough to see what they contain, there's a card for every file or window rather than one for every app, and cards can be organized to an extent that neither Honeycomb nor iOS allows.

Visually, webOS is probably most similar to RIM's BlackBerry Tablet OS. Despite our overall rating of the released-too-soon PlayBook, the tablet's OS is well-designed and easy on the eyes. Apple's iOS remains the most intuitive of the tablet user interfaces, but it's becoming clear that Apple will need to feature more real-time multitasking views and organizational tools in future iOS versions. Honeycomb is quite customizable, but can feel cluttered at times. WebOS 3.0 is a much cleaner approach. It's almost ironic, since one of Google's great strengths has been rethinking how users approach organization, such as with conversations in Gmail. HP's webOS stacks are downright Googlian.

A homepage toolbar is found at the bottom of the screen. It comes with Web (the browser), Email, Calendar, Messaging, and Photos & Videos preloaded alongside an arrow button which opens up the Launcher window. This is where you'll find all of your apps, downloads, the Settings menu, and access to the HP App Catalog. The bar can be customized to show whatever apps you want, but it holds a maximum of five apps at once.

Notifications are designed to be less invasive on the TouchPad than on Honeycomb tablets, but the end result is very similar: When you get an email message, a notification appears in the margin of your window, not in the middle of your screen where it could block content (which is the iPad's way of handling notifications). WebOS groups like notifications, letting you scroll through different email subject lines in the notification area.