I purchased the touchStone as a last-ditch attempt to get my HP Touchpad to charge the battery. For some reason, having gone thru swaps of USB cable and ac-to-dc transformers, the TouchPad refused to boot or otherwise indicate receiving a charge to its batteries. The TouchStone charger works by induction (that is, a magnetic field that does not require a wire to the touchpad, but the charger/stand unit does plug into the wall).
I was disappointed that, once placing the original touchpad (in my optional rubber case) in the new TouchStone charger cradle according to the instructions, that nothing happened. Similar to the failures with the wired chargers.
So eventually I got on the 'net with HP TouchPad support. We went thru a set of basic tests that I had mostly already done, and they hence concluded that the TouchPad itself, was faulty. They took my touchpad serial number, looked it up on their system and confirmed that the unit was still under warrantee. I have to conclude that their procedure is more definitive than the posted "diagnostics" that are found on the palm sites and the user blogs.
HP shipped me, overnight, a shipping container and some instructions, with which I sent the dead unit to their repair facility. The instructions warned me to back up my personal data and wipe the touchpad memory of such data, but since the device was dead, there was no way I could do that. I enclosed a note that said so, but have not appeared to get any specific response about that.
They sent me a replacement TouchPad, with a generic WebOS boot image, with none of my personal data on it, so I have to conclude that they could not recover whatever had been there. The replacement (probably factory re-condition) device does boot and does indicate successful charging on both conventional chargers and the TouchStone charger.
Ultimately my plan is to install a dual-boot Android ICS image and re-establish my various website passwords, but that process will be a gradual one; apparently there was some kind of palm.com "backup" website for which I had a valid login (having established it when first configuring the original TouchPad), and the replacement Touchpad indicated success in connecting to it, but so far I have not seen any indication of any of my prior personal files having been restored back to the new touchpad.
So either that restore has failed or perhaps I never had successfully created a "current" backup image of the old touchpad storage, prior to it having gone to the palm-site-in-the-sky about 2 months ago. Nor did I get any kind of note with the new device indicating the nature of the problem with the original TouchPad. Is it possible I did something wrong (such as, maybe use the wrong charger and shove too much DC voltage into the device ?). I guess I will never know.
But to HP's credit, they replaced the unit, fairly quickly (within a calendar week) and did not charge me anything for doing so.
I gather from some touchpad blog comments, that failures of the internal charging circuit (possibly part of the micro USB port) are known in a number
of TouchPads, but such a failure might have been worked-around by using the induction-based TouchStone. Since neither worked, I am forced to conclude that my TouchPad had some kind of more-profound failure.
I remain interested in other experiences and details about how/whether it might still be possible to get some of my personal data restored from the palm.com site, and how things are working out with Touchpad users who have installed and are using Android ICS, either dual-boot or instead of WebOS.
| Hard Drive | External |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
