I liked the fact that Skype and IM services were both integrated directly with TouchPad; however, that integration had some weird side effects. My TouchPad kept me logged in to IM even as I slept, and one night when I forgot to mute the TouchPad's volume, a co-worker on the East Coast sent me an IM ("Are you awake this early?"), thereby waking me up. As for Skype, calls I made using it seemed to be strangely quiet and muffled, and I was unable to video chat with anyone who's still on the of Skype rather than the less-good Skype 5. Almost every Skype user I know has opted not to upgrade to Skype 5, so that was a bummer.

I tested a beta version of an Amazon Kindle app for TouchPad, and was surprised at the jagged quality of the book text, which was present in both of the available display fonts. The text is much crisper on the . Text in the web browser was better, though still not as readable as I'd like, and I found the browser particularly slow when I tried to scroll many different pages. The browser also displayed the Macworld.com home page incorrectly, something I've never seen on any other browser, mobile or desktop, on any platform.

The TouchPad e-mail app is reminiscent of the iPad's Mail app, and it's well designed. But it, too, could be slow and sometimes e-mail messages simply wouldn't display when I tapped on them.

Though HP is kind enough to provide an app, called Quickoffice, that lets you browse common office document types and even load them from services such as Google Docs, I found the app a disappointment. It often failed to connect to my Google Docs and Dropbox accounts, and when it did connect, I found that it frequently did not display the document faithfully. One Google Document full of text was reduced to a single line. (HP acknowledged that there are issues with Quickoffice and Google Docs and that they company is working on a fix, with plans to add editing for Word and Excel files by mid-summer.) On the bright side, Google Docs loaded just fine in the TouchPad's web browser, and I was able to view and even edit documents from there.