Same price as an iPad?

You've got to be kidding. Their competitors seemed determined to hand the market to Apple. HP are new entrants to the market with no obvious advantages up against a mind-blowingly strong competitor. It doesn't take a genius...

Beggars Belief

Honestly, the ipad has the headstart on the market, everyone else is playing catch up. So you have to wonder why HP think people would buy this device if they can just get an ipad instead?

Even if it is *better* than the ipad HP have no market traction.

I'm sure there will be 100 geeky el reg commentards who pop up to decry The Cult of Jobs, The Walled Garden and all the other criticisms that are (sometimes deservedly) pointed at Cupertino but that's not the point, geeky commentards will be buying netbooks anyway because they can't use a tablet to run Matlab and code PHP on the train.

So why would your average suburban Joe or Jane choose HP over apple? They don't care that the HP has dual core snapdragon, they care that the app store has a shed load of fart apps.

Does HP have an app store? I'm guessing they do.

Is it bigger or better than the apple one?

Somehow I doubt it. Not at this point anyway, and if they want it to grow to match apple they will need punters, lots of punters, to attract the devs.

Pricing like this is unlikely to attract the number of punters they will require to make a sustainable ecosystem around webOS, which is a shame.

A damned shame, really. It's probably quite nice.