HP Announces The TouchPad

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

It’s official. Palm’s new WebOS device is called the Touchpad. It has a 9.7-inch screen, front 1.3-megapixel camera, and comes in 16 or 32GB models. It runs a 1.2GHz Snapdragon Processor processor and the screen resolution is 1024×768.

Designed by the “hundreds of talented programmers” on the WebOS team, the TouchPad is HP’s second slate of the new decade, the first being the HP Slate 500.

UPDATE – The Product Page for the TouchPad is now live.


The TouchPad is Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein’s baby. WebOS suffered from a massive downturn when the company was sold a mere nine months ago and all of the hard work the Palm team put into it seemed for naught. However, the TouchPad points to a new direction for Palm and the WebOS’ unique “card” interface seems perfectly suited for a slate form factor.

The device supports multi-tasking and Flash. It comes with Quickoffice and supports Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net for cloud file storage as well as HP Wireless Printer support. It also uses Skype for video calls.

A brief spec list:

  • Dual core, 1.2 Ghz Snapdragon processor
  • 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR,
  • Gyro/Accelerometer, Compass
  • 9.7, 1024×768 display, 1.3 megapixel webcam, supports video calling
  • 1.6 pounds, 13.7 mm thick

Note that is is almost exactly the same size as the current iPad, for comparison’s sake. The device runs all of the standard WebOS PIM applications including Palm’s excellent mail app. It also supports Flash out of the box, so all of your favorite websites (that use Flash) will work seamlessly.

Product Page

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