The activity-card metaphor works well for navigating open items--be they Web pages, individual e-mail messages, or apps--although newcomers may be confused about how to open cards, fan them out, and stack them. To move among cards, you simply swipe along the left-right axis. You tap a card to open it full-screen, tap and hold to select a card and drag it somewhere else, or tap and slide up to dismiss it. To move out of a card to another one, you swipe up from just beyond the bottom bezel to minimize the card and return to the home screen.

I like this arrangement--the centered design makes it easy to navigate, as well as to group together similar things from different apps (such as a map that shows a restaurant location, plus the open email message that confirms the time for the lunch meeting). You can also group together multiple Web pages on a single topic. Some apps, such as the Facebook app, have a menu option that lets you open an additional activity card, so you can have several pages open at once. HP hasn't indicated a theoretical maximum for the number of activity cards that users can have open simultaneously; at one point, however, when I had numerous cards open, the TouchPad suddenly rebooted--and afterward it had no open cards at all. I couldn't tell whether that occurred because I overtaxed the tablet or because some other issue cropped up.

The TouchPad has lots of other interface niceties built in. A quick tap in the upper-right corner reveals the settings shortcuts; this is extremely handy, and one of the best tablet-interface tweaks I've seen, rivaling those of Android 3.1. With that simple tap, a menu pops down to show the date, the percentage of battery life remaining, the brightness control, Wi-Fi, VPN, and Bluetooth connectivity, the airplane-mode setting, the rotation lock, and the audio mute. The rotation-lock button became important for me, since the TouchPad grew easily confused and was sensitive to shifts in angle; once it even flipped rotation with no provocation.

Directly to the left of the status pop-down are notifications, which you can flick through one by one. This unique approach is especially useful for scanning inbound text messages and email.

Another design point done well is the nicely thought-out keyboard design. With a dedicated number row at the top and conveniently situated buttons for "@" and ".com," this keyboard ranks among the most usable and touch-typist-friendly I've seen (not counting custom Android keyboards on some tablets). My only gripe with the keyboard is the lack of pop-up letters, or a larger halo effect around the letter keys to indicate which one I pressed.