Touch and go
If you doubt how much the tablet market is completely dictated by Apple right now, check out the price of all the others. With some minor variations they all match Apple's pricing exactly, and now HP has joined the herd.
HP announced the UK pricing and availability of the Wi-Fi version its TouchPad tablet today and - drum-roll please - the 16GB version will cost £399, while the 32GB one will cost £479. This is exactly the same price as, not only the iPad 2, but the Motorola Xoom and the BlackBerry PlayBook.
The novel thing about HP's offering is the platform. HP bought Palm over a year ago, promising to incorporate the crown-jewel webOS platform into all kinds of devices, but they've been pretty thin on the ground so far. The TouchPad is the biggest launch since the acquisition, and gives people the chance to see how webOS measures up to Apple, Android, etc in the booming tablet market.
"What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS," said Jon Rubinstein, boss of Palm at HP. "The platform's unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP's scale can do with webOS."
While the TouchPad will be available in the US, France and Germany on 1 July, we'll have to wait until the middle of the month for our go. We will be able to pre-order it from 19 June, but no specific retailers have been named.