HP Touchpad will be available on 1 July

COMPUTER MAKER HP has announced that its Touchpad tablet with HP's own WebOS operating system will be available from 1 July.

Before you get too excited the availability date for the tablet only applies to the United States, France and Germany. HP annoyingly has not mentioned a date for the UK, saying instead, "The Wi-Fi version of HP Touchpad will be available in the UK from mid-July."

There will be two versions of the WiFi only Touchpad, one with 16GB of internal storage and one with 32GB. They will cost £399 and £479, respectively, and will be available directly from HP as well as other retailers.

We've not heard much from HP, which has been vague about the date for UK availability. The only date we can find online for the device is on Amazon.com, which states that the device will be released on 17 July.

You might say that HP is a bit late in joining the tablet market, which is already full of various devices of different sizes running various operating systems. What HP has that is unique is its own operating system, WebOS, for which HP has released an SDK free of charge.

It hopes that this will provide an alternative to the other tablets on the market, which often have the same software. Android 3.0 Honeycomb springs to mind.

Jon Rubinstein, SVP of the Palm global business unit at HP said, "The platform's unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use." µ