The HP TouchPad Review: webOS on the Big Screen

Phone Calls on the TouchPad

Forgive me as I may be a bit too excited about this feature, but I really think HP gets where tablets need to go as a result of this next item. When paired with a webOS phone via Bluetooth, you can use the TouchPad to place and receive phone calls.

The pairing process is pretty straight forward although there are hiccups thanks to the current state of webOS bugginess. Once paired you can lock your phone and put it aside as your TouchPad is now your conduit to telephony.

By default calls come through the TouchPad's speakers and use the mic along the top of the tablet. If you want your conversation private, you'll need to use a mic/headset combo (either wired or Bluetooth).

Thankfully while in a phone call you can still multitask. With the calling card pushed off to the side you can still use your TouchPad like you would normally. You can conduct an IM conversation, browse the web, or respond to emails while the call is going on. I can see this being particularly useful if your TouchPad is your primary computing device and you need to be on a conference call. You can take calls without ever moving your eyes off of the TouchPad and without interrupting what you were doing prior.

There are of course problems with the calling app. The TouchPad would occasionally drop audio when initiating or leaving a call. Sometimes when I lost audio here I wouldn't hear any audio throughout the TouchPad until I reset the device. I also wasn't able to access voicemail or view any of the call history on the TouchPad itself. Since the calls are actually routed through the paired phone, in my case a Veer, the call log appears on the paired phone - not the TouchPad. While I can understand why it works this way, I think I'd prefer a copy on the TouchPad at least in addition to what's stored on the phone.

Here's to hoping HP gets this stuff worked out in the first update to the tablet, otherwise it'll be a very rough road for any early adopters.

The reason I feel like the TouchPad's phone integration proves that HP understands the future of the tablet is because it helps integrate functionality. HP has a tablet that can, at least on paper, do more than competing tablets can do. In a perfect world you'd be able to quickly switch between apps, carry a phone conversation, SMS and IM people without having to distinguish which protocol you're using, all at the same time and all on the TouchPad. Today the TouchPad's performance issues and bugs are what remain in the way of that goal, but the vision is there. Just like your Mac or PC today is capable of doing a lot, very well, I believe tablets are headed in that direction too. Multitasking is key and making it so you don't need to reach for another device to do what you need to do is an important part of making tablets a permanent resident in anyone's computing life.

Skype Integration

The TouchPad wouldn't be a modern day tablet without some sort of video calling support. Apple has FaceTime, Google has Google Video Chat and HP has Skype. The Messaging app is what you use to send text messages to Skype users, but for voice and video calls you actually use the Phone & Video Calls app.

The process is pretty seamless, to test it I had Brian Klug call me on Skype. I was busy doing something else with the TouchPad but I got a ringtone and notification.

Video calls can only happen in portrait mode. While incoming video was good quality as you can see above, that's more than I could say for the video I was sending out. This is what I looked like on Brian's screen:

Eeech. Video automatically goes away when you switch away from the Phone & Video Calls app, but audio continues. Unfortunately I did have problems getting video to come back after switching back to the calling app, chalk it up to another webOS 3 bug.

The ability to hold a conversation while doing other things however is a nice feature of the TouchPad. If you spend a lot of time on Skype, you'll definitely appreciate the TouchPad.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record however, performance is once again a problem here. Here's a look at CPU usage during my Skype call with Brian:

It appears that the calling app is single threaded and during it call the app uses all of one core. Unfortunately just scrolling around the OS can easily eat up an entire core, leaving not much headroom left for multitasking. Any performance issues I had with webOS before were exasperated during my Skype call.

The audio dropout bug I had with regular phone calls also appeared during my Skype testing.