Reviews for HP's TouchPad starting coming in last week, and the opinions were decidedly in the "mixed" category. While many reviewers praised the overall webOS 3.0 experience, there were plenty of performance problems and bugs to be found. In addition, there is a lack of quality to apps to be found for the TouchPad, which has to go up against more seasoned tablets running iOS and Honeycomb.

Rather than simply ignore or laugh in the face of criticism like Apple, former Palm CEO and current HP exec Jon Rubinstein has heard the complaints from reviewers and is on a mission to stomp out existing issues with the platform. Rubenstein sent an email to his employees that addresses the problems with webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad and notes how the early reviews mirror those of a certain operating system release from Apple. 

Here's the email in its entirety courtesy of PalmCentral:

Team,

Today we bring the HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 to the world.  The HP team has achieved something extraordinary – especially when you consider that it’s been just one year since our work on the TouchPad began in earnest.  Today also marks the start of a new era for HP as our vision for connected mobility begins to take form - an ecosystem of services, applications and devices connected seamlessly by webOS. 

If you’ve seen the recent TouchPad reviews you know that the industry understands HP’s vision and sees the same potential in webOS as we do.  David Pogue from the New York Times says “there are signs of greatness here.” (I’ve included links to David’s review and others below.) You’ve also seen that reviewers rightly note things we need to improve about the webOS experience. The good news is that most of the issues they cite are already known to us and will be addressed in short order by over-the-air software and app catalog updates.  We still have work to do to make webOS the platform we know it can be, but remember…..it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

In that spirit, Richard Kerris, head of worldwide developer relations for webOS, reminded me yesterday of the first reviews for a product introduced a little over ten years ago: 

 "...overall the software is sluggish" 

"...there are no quality apps to use, so it won’t last" 

"...it's just not making sense...." 

It’s hard to believe these statements described MacOS X - a platform that would go on to change the landscape of Silicon Valley in ways that no one could have imagined.

The similarities to our situation are obvious, but there’s also a big difference. Like David Pogue, our audiences get that webOS has the potential for greatness. And like me, they know that your hard work and passion, and the power of HP’s commitment to webOS, will turn that potential into the real thing.

The OS X comparison seems like an apt one, although the initial OS X release was a v1.0 consumer operating system and webOS for the TouchPad is now up to v3.0.

In addition, Rubinstein's efforts to quickly improve upon the shortcomings of HP's latest tablet platform should be welcome news to webOS fans and potential customers who are being courted by the likes of Apple and Google. 

HP, like fellow competitor RIM, is going to find it increasingly hard to compete in this sector having come so late to the party. Apple has already carved out a lion's share of the market with the iPad. Google's Honeycomb-based tablets are starting to feed on the table scraps leftover. That currently leaves RIM and HP looking to grab a few crumbs that are left on the floor. 

However, just as RIM’s smartphone market share started heading south as Android smartphones gained in strength (and variety), there is still hope that at least one or two additional tablet platforms will have a fair shake at taking a sizable chunk of the market.