[sc:mobile-category ]We hardly knew ya… it seems a little premature to kill a product that has only been out a month, but hey what do I know.
I can only hope they at least release another update to fix up the remaining issues, but I don’t hold out much hope. Unless of course its just a cruel joke, please?
It does seem odd they just announced the 64g model with a fast process on the same day as they kill the product…
[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve now had a good chance to play with the 3.0.2 update to the TouchPad and there are several significant improvements in it:
In general, I’ve seen several reviews that indicate the sometimes jerky pauses of the OS have been cleared up in the update, but that is not my experience so far. It might be slightly better, but it still too often pauses for no reason with no feed back to the user.
Aside from the above fixed, the rest of the issues I had with the TouchPad are still there, its nice to see HP releasing an update so quickly and I hope it continues to improve.
I also picked up the HP TouchPad case, which quite honestly was a complete waste of money, its biggest issue is that when it is on the TouchPad is that you cannot use the wireless charging. Other than that is just adds bulk to the unit and the cover doesn’t “latch” closed in any way so it just kind of flaps around.
The review of third party apps is still on its way, I’ve recently purchased a couple and have just been waiting to get enough of them together to warrant a review.
[sc:mobile-category ]The first update to the TouchPad was released last week and in general it was pretty minimal, two new applications (calculator and clock) but the big improvement so far has been the e-mail app no longer drops message bodies! HURAH!
Also included in the changelog is a fix for the overtly sensitive screen rotation, I’ll have to disable the screen lock and give it a try.
Overall the TouchPad still feels jerky in several places and has little visual feed back when this happens, but it’s still better than it was.
The most important point is that HP is serious enough about the TouchPad to be releasing an update this quickly.
[sc:mobile-category ]Woohoo, the next release of Windows Phone 7 was just released to manufacturing (RTM’d) which usually means 4-6 weeks before we can expect to see it start rolling out if MS’s history is anything to go by.
[sc:mobile-category ]It’s been just over a week with the TouchPad and so I thought I’d share some more thoughts on the tablet since my initial ones.
First, I have to admit that I’m using it more than I thought I would. It is quite a convenient unit to have around the house to keep an eye on e-mail, look up information and do some web browsing on.
I mentioned before the rotation sensor was a little too aggressive in rotating the screen and that is probably my biggest grip with the unit. In fact I’ve now taken to enabling to rotation lock on the unit so as to ensure it doesn’t rotate at the wrong time.
The second biggest issue is the mail application. As I noted previously it has a tendency not to display the message bodies in e-mail after a while and then requires me to close the mail app and then restart it. I’m even considering calling support to report the bug just so I know it will get fixed 
.
One reason I purchased the TouchPad instead of any of the other tablets out there was the wireless charging support built in. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t support this in these kinds of devices and the TouchStone dock is amazing. Just drop the TouchPad on it’s stand and charging commences, how lovely not to have to mess with cables, or worse forget and find yourself at the end of the battery.
The web browser and flash support do make this a much more usable tablet, there really hasn’t been a website I’ve gone to that hasn’t worked, sometimes there will be a small quirk in the site, but it has been great so far.
As I mentioned in the original review the sound quality on the TouchPad is great and it continues to amaze me, loud, clear and with great range.
The only new issue I have so far with it is that I tried playing some TV episodes on it which were DivX encoded and apparently the TouchPad doesn’t support DivX. This seems like a major oversight with so much content in DivX these days.
So, overall, I’m actually quite surprised with how much I like the TouchPad and how much I use it. Perhaps with a couple of updates it will be even better, we’ll have to wait and see.