Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

The reviews for HP's TouchPad are in, and we have a consensus: It mimics the iPad well but is not yet a proper replacement; WebOS is sexy but not yet perfect or fully mature; the TouchPad is a solid but late entry to the tablet market; and where are the apps? This last point is most important. Only a day after reviewers skewered HP for offering just 300 TouchPad apps at launch, Apple hit 100,000 apps on the iPad

Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to launch the TouchPad tablet this week, but already CEO Leo Apotheker is thinking about what comes next. In an interview with Bloomberg Wednesday, Apotheker said the company is in talks with third parties to license WebOS, the software piloting its mobile devices. That should certainly raise red flags for Google , which has pinned the future of its mobile business on licensing its Android platform out to hardware makers such as Motorola and Samsung .

On July 1, HP will launch its HP TouchPad, its WebOS-based tablet, into a crowded sea of tablets already adrift in the wake of Apple's iPad--RIM's PlayBook, any number of Android tablets from Motorola, Toshiba, and so on. With such a late entry to the crowded marketplace, critics have said, HP lags behind competitors who have a huge head start fostering robust app environments. Android and Apple boast hundreds of thousands of apps on their platforms