Speaking of performance, to call the TouchPad sluggish doesn't do justice to its laggy behavior. This may be the first tablet running Qualcomm's dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon APQ8060 processor, but if I hadn't known that a dual-core CPU was inside, I never would have guessed. Never mind the onerous initial boot-up process: The TouchPad took 69 seconds for a cold boot-up, compared with the iPad 2's 26 seconds, and it took nearly twice as long as most of the competition did in our SunSpider JavaScript test. Loading apps felt interminable; Quickoffice took 10 seconds to launch, in contrast to the near-instant launch of Apple's Pages. While spending time with the TouchPad, I felt as if I got to know WebOS's spinning-circle and pulsating-logo graphics (two indicators that something is loading) far too well. Even scrolling through lists and content felt jerky, not smooth.

If tablets are ever to rival laptops in terms of productivity, file interoperability is a critical component. And this remains a major hurdle for the TouchPad and for WebOS. For starters, when you transfer files to the device, it offers no clearly delineated starting point to dump documents, images, videos, or music--everything just gets transferred over haphazardly. Even Android's messy standard file-folder organization provides a better starting point. HP says that WebOS indexes files transferred to the tablet, an approach that sounds as if it should simplify transfers. But it actually ends up making the task more difficult, since no guided structure exists to start with.

In my trials, the results of this approach were mixed. The TouchPad recognized music files in the Music Player app, and pictures and videos were visible in the Photos & Videos app--but the latter app also picked up the cover-art images of my music downloads (from Amazon). Images in subfolders were broken out, labeled with their immediate folder name, so I got "227_320" or the like as a folder name instead of whatever descriptive name the top-level folder had. And video file names failed to show up in the app (something that HP says will be fixed soon in an over-the-air update). As for documents, Word files I transferred over were visible in Quickoffice, in a searchable list view, but two Excel spreadsheets didn't open. A PowerPoint file opened, but with each swipe down came the familiar pulsating logo as Quickoffice opened each page. PDFs that I tried opening from the "file browser" (not that it's called that) in Quickoffice actually opened in the Adobe Reader app instead.