The HP TouchPad Review: webOS on the Big Screen

One of My Favorite Tablet Keyboards

The virtual keyboard on the TouchPad is a five row design, including a dedicated row for numbers and punctuation. Given that the TouchPad is a more productivity oriented tablet than many of its competitors, this move makes a lot of sense. You can't get around typing numbers so HP doesn't force you to another screen to access them. I also appreciate the TouchPad's use of alternate functions on the numeric row - it mimics a standard Mac/PC keyboard (e.g. hold shift and hit 1 to get an exclamation mark).

Portrait

Landscape

The numeric row does make all of the keys a bit smaller on the TouchPad but given its 9.7-inch screen size the tradeoff isn't too big of a deal. I was able to type on the keyboard just fine in portrait mode as well as landscape, although my fingers would occasionally mistype a word as a result of the smaller keyboard (or buggy key boundaries).

From a pure layout standpoint I think the TouchPad has the best virtual tablet keyboard in the business. It's a natural transition from a standard PC keyboard.

There is support for autocorrect but it's mostly passive, at least at first. Simple spelling errors are occasionally corrected but most of the time the word is just underlined, requiring two taps to replace it with a suggestion or add it to the dictionary. HP does let you look at the custom dictionary as well as define shortcuts (e.g. whenever you type tgif you can make webOS expand it to "the urkel").

I'm not terribly impressed by the autocorrect, especially since it seems to miss basic misspellings:

I don't feel any company has really gotten both the keyboard and autocorrect right on a tablet yet, so HP isn't alone here.

Copying and pasting works similar to other OSes:

Although if you have to edit a URL for example there's no magnifying lens or anything that allows you to finely position your cursor.