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How'd HP do it? Seemingly by just slashing the price to $99

If youre not thrilled with the idea of buying a tablet with a pricey wireless plan, youre in luck. Now there are plenty of Wi-Fi-only options from which to choose.

Phil McKinney is the president and CTO of HP's personal systems group, the group that oversaw the TouchPad's creation and the group the company just said it will be spinning off from HP and possibly selling . He's behind HP's strategy to control both the software and hardware of its smartphones and tablets--a strategy that has paid off well for Apple, but a strategy HP CEO Leo Apotheker said he was no longer committed to.

I've been playing with HP's new TouchPad for a week, but it only took a few minutes to notice the tablet's similarities to the iPad. I'm not just talking about the TouchPad's WebOS--all players in the tablet space have undoubtedly taken cues from Apple's software (see: apps, gestures, etc.). But even HP's hardware design is iPad-like, from the placement of the (single) home button to the webcam to the auto-lock key to the volume seesaw switch.

For Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad tablet, which heads to market on Friday, the company avoided using Android at all costs . Well, actually, at a very specific cost: HP spent $1.2 billion last year to acquire Palm, which helped develop the TouchPad's slick software, WebOS.

Richard Kerris, the former Apple exec, is gliding through his presentation of HP's TouchPad. As the current VP of worldwide developer relations for WebOS, the slick software giving life to HP's latest mobile devices, Kerris is giddily running through the tablet's bells and whistles: the design, the partnerships, the apps, the engineering. But suddenly our discussion is interrupted by the sound of woodwinds, dancing up the scale

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