Quotes of the Day

When Apple unveiled the iPad in January of 2010, it left a gaggle of other consumer-electronics companies suddenly anxious to get into the tablet game. Very, very anxious. So anxious, in fact, that some of them set deadlines for themselves that made it impossible to ship fully-baked products.

That was certainly true of Samsung's original Galaxy Tab, which ran an operating system designed for phones, not tablets. And Motorola's Xoom, which debuted without several of its key features and with a buggy version of Google's Android Honeycomb operating system. And RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook, which was just a mess.

HP, however, came off as less frantic than its peers. True, it plunked down $1.2 billion a year ago to buy mobile-computing pioneer Palm and its excellent WebOS operating system. But then it announced that its first WebOS tablet, the TouchPad, wouldn't be ready until this summer. It's an important product — the flagship of an entire fleet of WebOS gizmos that HP says is on its way, including phones, printers, PCs, additional tablets, and maybe even products manufactured by other companies.

Wait for the TouchPad until HP could release something that felt refined, not rushed? That didn't feel like an imposition — it sounded like a great idea.

The tablet starts shipping this Friday. For the past week, I've lived with one that HP loaned to me. And while I found lots to like, I also discovered that the extra time that the company took hasn't paid off in a perfectly polished product. Actually, the TouchPad I've been using is downright buggy, and suffers from a shortage of key apps. Which is why my advice to anyone who wants to buy a tablet right now remains unchanged: Get an iPad 2.

That recommendation isn't set in stone. The TouchPad that early-paying customers receive will be at least slightly better than the one I tested: HP says that several notable apps which I couldn't try will arrive at the very last minute. (Among the stragglers are programs for downloading music and movies, along with digital editions of TIME and sister mags Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated.) The company is already working on a software update intended to make the tablet more spritely and less quirky, and reports that useful features such as the ability to edit word-processing documents and spreadsheets will be along soon.

HP may have visions of a bevy of WebOS devices dancing in its head, but it's starting with a single tablet that doesn't try particularly hard to be unlike the iPad. Even the pricing is the same: $499 for a 16GB wi-fi model and $599 for a 32GB one. (For now, there's no 64GB TouchPad or one with built-in wireless broadband; a version that uses AT&T's "4G" HSPA+ network will arrive later this year.)

Most companies that build iPad rivals get creative with the display — it's bigger or smaller than Apple's, and usually has a wider aspect ratio designed with movies in mind. HP didn't mess with a good thing: the TouchPad sports a magazine-like 9.7" screen with 1024-by-768 resolution, just like the iPad. It's one of the most pleasing tablet displays I've seen to date, even though it appears to default to a dimmer brightness setting than the iPad 2, perhaps to conserve battery power. (Widescreens are nifty in principle, but they're too tall and skinny when you hold them in portrait mode.)

The TouchPad shows several telltale signs that its design was hatched way back during the era of the original iPad. Encased in black plastic, it's .52" (13.7mm) thick and weighs 1.6 pounds (740 grams) — just a shade more portly than last years iPad, but noticeably chunkier than the iPad 2 and Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1. It's got a 1.3-megapixel video camera on the front, which is nice — except that it's typical for new tablets to have cameras on their backsides, too.

One hardware department where the TouchPad is a leader is audio: It features Dr. Dre-approved "Beats" technology and stereo speakers rather than the iPad 2's single speaker. Music sounded unusually good whether I was listening out loud or over headphones. Positioning stereo speakers on a tablet is a challenge, though. When I held the TouchPad in portrait mode, both speakers were on the device's left side, leaving Tom Jobim sounding like he was standing on top of Elis Regina when they recorded "Águas de Março" rather than at her side.

As for battery life, the TouchPad story can be summarized in four words: "Close, but no iPad." HP promises up to nine hours of video playback and eight hours of Web browsing over wi-fi, compared to Apple's estimates of 10 hours apiece for these tasks. As long as I charged up the tablet at night, I was able to get through a day of heavy use without fretting over the power level.

The best thing by far about the TouchPad is WebOS, the only tablet operating system that rivals Apple's iOS for ... well, pleasantness. It looks good, it's logically and consistently organized, and it always errs on the side of simplicity over geeky complications. It's going to face stiffer competition this fall when Apple's iOS 5 and Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich updates show up; even then, though, it should retain some distinctive virtues.

The TouchPad's core apps are pretty much the same ones as on most other tablets — browser, e-mail, calendar, maps, music player, photo and video viewer — with some unique WebOS tricks. For instance, you can multitask not only between apps but within them. If you start composing an e-mail and then realize you need to consult a message in your inbox, you can toggle between the new message and the old one with a couple of taps.

"Synergy," one of WebOS's signature features, artfully weaves together information from disparate sources. One record in the contact database might include details culled from Facebook, Skype, Linked In, and both personal and business Gmail accounts; one session in the Messaging app might involve simultaneous chats with folks on AIM, Google Chat, and Skype. Other devices mimic this basic idea but nobody's doing it as elegantly.

A way-clever tool called "Just Type" lets you begin actions of all sorts even before you've left the WebOS desktop. Tap out the name "Tom Tompkins," for example, and you can immediately do anything from Googling it to addressing an e-mail to creating a calendar event. Even the on-screen keyboard provides a welcome upgrade: It's got a row of number keys, making it much easier to enter anything that involves both letters and digits. (On the other hand, the TouchPad didn't correct my typos on the fly like an iPad does, even though I had its auto-correction option turned on.)

Anyone who's enough of a WebOS groupie to own both a TouchPad and an HP WebOS phone such as the Veer or upcoming Pre 3 gets a couple of additional, Bluetooth-enabled capabilities. If you open a Web page in the TouchPad browser and then tap the phone against the tablet's browser, the page will automatically load on the phone. You can also piggyback on the phone's wireless connection to make and receive phone calls on the TouchPad.(The phone app doubles as a Skype client that does both voice and video calls.)

One WebOS downside has persisted since the software premiered on the Palm Pre smartphone two years ago: It loads apps sluggishly. Programs that would pop up nearly instantly on the iPad or an Android tablet can take several seconds to launch on the TouchPad. But that was a minor irritation compared to the biggest problem I encountered with this tablet: It's glitchy.

Steve Jobs is fond of saying that Apple products just work. In my trials, the TouchPad too often just didn't work. A few examples:

• Music playback didn't always begin the moment I pressed play, and sometimes stammered mid-song;

• A 1080p movie that looked dynamite on the iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1 wouldn't play at all on the TouchPad;

• The tablet thoughtfully discovered and configured the HP printer that sits on my network. But whenever I tried to print, it told me that my OfficeJet was incompatible.

The TouchPad was at its shakiest when I crammed its RAM with a bountiful supply of apps, Web pages, and other items. Like an overtaxed Windows 98 computer, it would crack under the pressure, rendering screens incompletely, ignoring my input, and (on one occasion) spontaneously rebooting. Closing a few programs restored it to good working order. I know that it's possible to build a tablet that doesn't freak out when it's short on memory, though — because I've never seen an iPad or Honeycomb tablet do it.

And then there's Adobe's Flash. Like every tablet maker whose product isn't called "iPad," HP is touting its support for Flash content such as videos and games. I was able to use the TouchPad's browser to listen to the Grooveshark music service and watch Daily Show clips at Comedy Central's site. But Amazon's Instant Video didn't play properly in full-screen mode and usually choked partway through a movie; Facebook's version of Bejeweled was unplayable; Google's Picnik photo editor didn't load, period. As usual, I'm left with the distinct impression that any marketing exec who gloats about the presence of Flash on a mobile device hasn't actually tried it.

Mobile Flash may be an overhyped irrelevance, but as with any new computing platform, the TouchPad's fate will rest in large part on the quality and quantity of its third-party software. To paraphrase what Spencer Tracy said about Katharine Hepburn in Pat and Mike, there isn't that much meat in HP's App Catalog, but what's there is cherce. I found some snazzy games — yes, Angry Birds is one of them — and little-known gems that help to compensate for the paucity of big-name titles. (A Twitter client with the off-putting name of Spaz HD turned out to be surprisingly solid.) The tablet also comes bundled with Amazon's Kindle e-reader and a powerful Facebook app that HP wrote itself.

About 300 tablet applications will be live in the App Catalog when the TouchPad reaches consumers; HP says that about 6,200 programs designed for WebOS phones will also work. (Some of the ones I tried displayed in a phone-sized window, while others stretched themselves to fill the tablet's display.) Apps that haven't been optimized for the TouchPad's big screen are stopgaps at best, but if a decent percentage of the developers who have created phone-sized WebOS apps build TouchPad versions, the tablet's software library could improve rapidly.

All of this makes for a much happier situation than with the BlackBerry PlayBook, which hit a more impressive number — hey, 3,000 new apps on day one! — by letting in embarrassingly amateurish efforts. And the TouchPad doesn't need to get to even ten percent of the iPad's 90,000 tablet apps to provide an impressive assortment of stuff. But the iPad retains a sizable lead in app excellence as well as sheer volume. We'll know that the TouchPad has arrived when it offers a painting program as good as Brushes and a personalized magazine to match Flipboard — or, even better, when it has Brushes and Flipboard themselves.

The HP execs who are responsible for WebOS are quick to remind everyone that they work for the largest technology company on the planet, and that it's committed to making the platform into a massive success. First, let's see if it buckles down, squashes the TouchPad's bugs, and convinces more developers that it's a product with a future. This tablet bears the burden of great potential; it'll be a real shame if it turns out to be nothing more than yet another unsatisfying, unfinished iPad alternative.

McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he's @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every Thursday on TIME.com.

• Harry McCracken