Yet one more thing that HP got right: printing. The TouchPad is the first tablet to make printing directly from the device viable and simple--if you have an HP wireless printer. I tried this function out on the , and it worked smoothly. From an app that supports printing, you just select the printer icon or choose the print command from the drop-down, select the wireless printer, and go through the built-in print-driver options, including the choice of black or color ink for text, and different sizes for photos (on the picture I tried, it let me pick between 4-by-6 and 5-by-7). I printed a photo (a bit darker than it ought to be, but this was on plain paper), a document, and a Web page, and the feature worked as billed.

Even the app navigation is fairly straightforward. On the dock, five apps--Web, Mail, Calendar, Messaging, and Photos & Videos--come preconfigured, but you can put in any apps you wish. The only fixed icon there is a cleanly designed up arrow that takes you to the Launcher. In the Launcher you'll find just four tabs, for apps, downloads (meaning downloaded apps), favorites, and settings. The preinstalled apps include Maps (powered by Microsoft's Bing Maps), Contacts, YouTube, Adobe Reader, the music player, and a Memos app (which I never got working).

WebOS offers a lot to like on the TouchPad: I found both the design and the navigation to be intuitive. But it suffers from a lot of rough patches and bugs, too, including graphical hiccups and organizational frustrations in the Photos & Videos app, Web-page display issues in the browser, and fuzzy photo and text rendering. Add in the fact that the preinstalled version of Quickoffice will support only reading Microsoft Office and Google Docs files, not editing them (editing is due "midsummer"), and the fact that you can't download files from the Web directly to the device, and the TouchPad clearly has some drawbacks. Sure, being able to edit a document in Google Docs on my laptop, and then see the document appear and refresh on the tablet, was cool. At launch, however, the TouchPad's usability feels highly limited.

Part of the limitation lies in the dearth of available apps, a familiar complaint for anyone who may have considered the first Android 3.0 tablet (the Motorola Xoom) or the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook. For all of the potential that WebOS certainly has for being a viable tablet OS, HP faces the same app-availability challenges that RIM and even Google face (see "" for more). At launch, HP says, the TouchPad will have at least 300 apps--a far cry from Apple's 100,000+ apps for iPad, but about comparable to the number of Honeycomb-specific apps on Google's Android Market. Nonetheless, a perusal of the App Catalog, as HP calls its app marketplace, reveals even fewer big-ticket, eye-catching apps than Android 3.0/3.1 Honeycomb has.