Computers are personal, but tablets are deeply personal.

Because of this, competing with the iPad is not as simple as going head to head with all the tangibles: hardware vs. hardware; OS vs. OS; 3rd-party apps vs. 3rd-party apps; and so on.

The iPad is more than the sum of its parts. The iPad has an intangible: Likability.

To date, nobody has been able to compete with Apple when it comes to the combination of hardware, operating system, and 3rd-party apps. If competitors have yet to even compete with the tangibles of the iPad, how then do they expect to compete with the intangibles?

From what I have seen and read about the TouchPad and webOS so far, this may be the first likable tablet since the iPad. It’s buggy and has a poor app store like the rest of the other tablets. But what the TouchPad has that the others do not is likability. And that gives me hope that it could be great.