Sooo…. I actually managed to order a HP Touchpad 32Gb here in Edinburgh to be picked up at Comet within 48 hours. I ordered when it was still a whopping 429£, but when I went to pick it up I got it at the UK discount price of 115, and I will get the VAT back too.

The first hours were frustrating because I was in the ESUG conference and we only had a WiFi with a so called “captive portal” with a login form - and the first time you power up a Touchpad it wants to hook up to a Palm Profile, and does not want to do that using a WiFi with a captive portal.

The Montague pub to the rescue later that evening, an open wifi. I am currently writing this post using the Bluetooth keyboard (so nice) while the TP is snugly positioned on the Touchstone inductive charger. Both these are great accessories. I have also managed to do Skype with my wife, really easy and worked well, hook up the calendar to Google with perfect sync, and in fact it synched over all my contacts etc from my Palm Profile for my Palm Pre 2 - just works!

I have done the OTA 3.0.2 update (in the pub while eating) and I have installed a bunch of apps, like the one I am typing in know - for WordPress. I have also activated the included 50Gb free cloud space included from box.net - brilliant.

Email app is running fine, Facebook app is very good, tons of other little nifty things - I am a happy camper! Is it just as “smooth as silk” as the iPad? No, but it excels in other areas like true multitasking, a real Linux beneath (bonus for me as a developer), synergy, full flash, 50Gb cloudspace for life included, really good virtual keyboard (multiple sizes even) etc etc. Sure, slightly thicker and slightly heavier - but…. BUT…. It cost me around 85£ with 32Gb RAM. That argument is a killer.

Day after tomorrow I will be demonstrating apps written in Jtalk running on it - yiha!