At 0.54 inches thick, the TouchPad is fatter than the iPad. It’s heavier, too, at 1.6 pounds. With its rounded edges and smooth plastic, it’s also more slippery than other tablets I’ve tested.
Turn it on, and the TouchPad looks like webOS smartphones. The software makes perfect sense on a tablet. For example: Applications appear onscreen as little “cards’’ that you can scroll through sideways, tap on to enlarge or flick to close. Each window you open within an application — numerous Web pages or in-progress emails, for example — shows up as its own card in a small stack for that app, and you can rearrange them as you please.
The TouchPad has the latest version of webOS, which adds features like the ability to pull your photos from Facebook and online photo sites into the device’s photo library, and “Touch to Share,’’ which will let you share content with certain webOS smartphones.
Generally, webOS made navigating a breeze. Its layout keeps the TouchPad’s home screen uncluttered, with the “Just type…’’ universal search function taking up a small amount of space in the center of the display and a strip of applications on the bottom of the screen.
I figured that the TouchPad’s screen would be great for watching videos. I wasn’t disappointed. Whether I was streaming Lady Gaga’s latest video oeuvre from YouTube or checking out the old Mike Myers comedy “So I Married an Axe Murderer’’ on Crackle, colors popped and images were crystal-clear.
The TouchPad was also good for surfing the Web, in part because it supports Flash video content, which the iPad does not. It couldn’t do everything. Here and there, a website didn’t look quite right, and TV and movie streaming site Hulu would not work on it. Overall, however, websites loaded and functioned as they would on a standard computer.
