After its announcement last week, this is the first opportunity we’ve had for a hands-on with HP’s WebOS-equipped TouchPad. If you haven’t had the chance to check out the news story covering the announcement, the core details are pretty straightforward.

The TouchPad is a 10in tablet, with a resolution of 1,024 x 768, running a tablet-optimised version of webOS, the mobile operating system HP inherited when it acquired Palm. Under the hood is a meaty dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm 8060 processor, there’s a 1.3-megapixel webcam on the front for making video calls with (but no camera on the rear), and HP will be selling the device in 16GB and 32GB versions. Initially only the Wi-Fi version will be available, but 3G-enabled versions will follow soon after.

So what is it like in the flesh? Well, it’s still four months away from being unleashed on the public, so there’s unsurprisingly the odd creak here and there, but otherwise it’s remarkably polished. There isn’t much to say about the front, other than it’s made from Corning’s scratch- and shatter-resistant Gorilla glass. All you see is the webcam and a small button in the centre of one of its short edges.

The rear panel is subtly curved and finished in polished black plastic, and it already feels up to snuff – it feels solid in the hand and the curved edges and corners make it very comfortable to hold. A quick session with the on-screen keyboard revealed the capacitive touchscreen to be as sensitive as you might expect, and on first impression HP has made a great start on customising the smartphone-focused webOS apps and user interface.

Particularly impressive is the email app, which elegantly presents your messages in a number of different ways: full message view emails take up the whole screen; drag a small handle at the bottom-left corner of the screen and a navigation view is revealed in a panel to the left; drag another handle and all your email inboxes appear in yet another panel. It sounds as if the screen might become crowded, but it doesn’t – especially in landscape mode. Another neat touch is the notifications menu: you can use this to directly browse and manage  emails without having to launch the full email app.

As for third-party apps, HP says “well-written” ones should display just as well on the touchpad screen as they do on the company’s smartphones. However, it says the new Enyo development platform should allow developers to write once and have their apps work just as well across all webOS devices.

As with previous webOS-based devices, the TouchPad handles multitasking beautifully. Hit the button on the edge of the screen and up pops the “card view”, representing the various applications running in the background; sweep left and right and the cards all scroll by, just as smoothly as they do on the Palm Pre 2.

Other notable features include “touch to share”, which uses HP’s next-generation Touchstone technology to transfer information between other webOS smartphones and the TouchPad, simply by resting the phone momentarily on the tablet’s edge. In demonstration we were shown a web page being sent from the TouchPad to the new Palm Pre3 (more on this beauty later on), which was a little underwhelming but HP promises there is “more to come”.

As with the BlackBerry PlayBook, it’s a positive first showing; it’s just a shame we have to wait until the summer for it.

But we’re not here to champion the champions, or lavish praise on the sensible: if you can’t wage bitter recriminations during the festive period, when can you? So, here we present the worst tech decisions of 2010.

RUNNING ANDROID ON TABLETS BEFORE IT’S READY

How best to combat the Apple iPad – a tablet interface that’s so breathtakingly simple that even the BBC’s pre-pubescent, twaddle-talking, F1 presenter Jake Humphrey can master it? The answer: shoe-horn an operating system designed exclusively for smartphones onto tablets and hope nobody notices the difference.

When even Google – the company that designed the operating system – admits Android really isn’t ready for tablets yet, you think people might take note. Yet, that didn’t stop companies such as Samsung, ViewSonic and, erm, clothes retailer Next from plunging in with devices that were just the wrong side of iffy (and in the case of the Next tablet, several counties the wrong side of iffy).

The most telling indictment of Android’s current unsuitability came when editor Tim Danton attempted to find just ten decent apps for our tablets buyer’s guide (on sale at all good newsagents now, folks), and spent the best part of a week swearing at the Android Marketplace, trying to find something other than Angry Birds to recommend.

THE CONVICTION OF PAUL CHAMBERS

Our friendly judicial system failed to see the funny side of a joke made on Twitter in 2010. Not once, but twice. Unfortunately for Paul Chambers, he was in the dock on both occasions.

After discovering his flight was cancelled because of January’s snow storms, the hapless Chambers tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Clearly alert to the fact that Al-Qaeda terrorists routinely announce their plans seven or so days in advance on social-networking sites, police subsequently swooped on Chambers’ house, confiscating his iPhone, laptop and desktop hard drive, and charging him with “sending  a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

Incredibly, Doncaster Magistrates convicted Chambers under section 127 of the Public Communications Act in May, ordering him to pay more than £1,000 in fines and costs. Even more incredibly, an appeal judge upheld the conviction in November, arguing that “anyone living in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences [of their actions].”

The possible consequences for free speech and common sense are even more disturbing.

ICO’s ALL-CLEAR ON GOOGLE WI-FI SCANDAL

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in 2010. When Google confessed that its Street View cars had been accidentally Hoovering up personal data from people’s Wi-Fi connections, the ICO sent a couple of crack investigators in to see what damage had been done. The upshot of their probe? No “meaningful” data had been collected. Rest easy, everybody.

Except a couple of months later, after investigations by other international privacy watchdogs, Google admitted that private emails and passwords were among the jumble of data gobbled up by its Street View cars, raising questions over the competence of the ICO’s initial investigation.

“The ICO seems more Keystone Cops than protector of our civil liberties,” said Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who uncovered a paucity of technical training among the ICO’s staff.

Meanwhile, an exclusive PC Pro investigation revealed the ICO was playing good cop, bad cop with Google: publicly upbraiding the search firm for a “a significant breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act”, while privately sending chummy emails to Google’s staff bemoaning Halfon’s “misrepresentation” of its investigation.

What use is a watchdog that doesn’t bark, let alone bite?

THE PASSING OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL

Just ahead of the General Election, many tech-savvy Britons were wondering whether dictatorships were really that bad after all, after no fewer than 189 MPs lent their support to the draconian Digital Economy Bill.

Among the bill’s lowlights were the threat of disconnecting alleged file-sharers without court proceedings, and a clause that requires ISPs to block access to “”a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright”.

The hastily constructed legislation was rushed through in the “wash-up” before the end of the Parliament, and was debated in an almost empty chamber by MPs who often didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who voted against the Government for the first time, said the matter had left him feeling “physically sick”. He wasn’t the only one.

BOB MUGLIA’S SILVERLIGHT SPEECH

Even before Microsoft’s Bob Muglia took to the stage at October’s PDC, developers were nervous about Silverlight’s prospects. By the time he’d finished, they were positively terrified.

With Apple refusing to allow Silverlight apps onto the iPhone/iPad, and the growing support for HTML5, many felt Silverlight was already being squeezed out of the picture. So when the president of the server and tools division stood up and said, “Our Silverlight strategy and focus going forward has shifted,” developers began to fidget in their seats. “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including [Apple’s] iOS platform,” he added, leaving the Silverlight developers crying into their free cappuccinos.

Muglia’s comments reverberated around the tech press and developer forums, with many asking whether Silverlight – which had only recently been chosen as the core development platform for Windows Phone 7 – had been sidelined?

Muglia subsequently posted a blog, admitting that his PDC speech had “caused controversy and confusion” before claiming that “Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft”.

The damage may already have been done.

HP BUYING PALM

Several household names were in the frame when Palm put itself up for sale at the beginning of the year, but HP wasn’t among them. So what convinced HP to emerge from nowhere to pay a staggering $1.2 billion for a firm that was losing money hand over fist?

The Palm Pre was hyped an iPhone killer, but its “stuttering speeds, less-than-alluring hardware package, and occasionally confusing OS” failed to surpass the iPhone, according to our review. The succeeding Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus have done little to shake our conviction, either. Buyers are equally unimpressed: Palm’s webOS commands a mere 1.3% of its home US market, according to the latest figures from Nielsen. It doesn’t even figure in Gartner’s predictions for mobile devices OSes for 2014.

HP says it wants to put webOS in everything from tablets to web-connected printers, but we’ve yet to see a single product announcement (although that may change come CES in January). But starting from such a small a base, will HP be able to convince app developers that it’s worth their while developing for webOS? We very much doubt it.

THE BROWSER BALLOT

Yes, the EU imposed the browser ballot on Microsoft last year and it first started appearing on Windows desktops in October 2009, but the full consequences of the decision wouldn’t be felt until this year –  which is why we’ve included it here.

For those of you who’ve forgotten all about the browser ballot, let me begin… after a decade of making less progress than Bruce Forysth’s fringe, Opera suddenly decided it was Microsoft to blame for its appalling market share on the desktop, not the lack of killer features in its browser.

Somehow the EU bought Opera’s argument, and so ensued the ‘browser ballot’ – a little screen that offers Internet Explorer users a dozen previously unheard of delights such as Maxthon, Sleipnir and, of course, Opera. Most of which are pure gubbins, according to our reviews of the browser ballot contenders.

So, more than a year after the ballot was first introduced, has Opera been vindicated with a tidal wave of users deserting Internet Explorer in favour of the Scandinavian surfing sensation? Not exactly, no. According to Stat Counter Europe, Opera has seen its market share go from 4.05% in October 2009 (when the ballot was introduced) to… wait for it… 4.27% in November 2010. A staggering increase of 0.22%.

To be fair, Internet Explorer’s share has tumbled from 47.78% to 38.91%, but that’s largely due to the emergence of Google Chrome (3.99% in October 2009 to 13.09% in November 2010). And while Chrome is indeed in the browser ballot, we can’t help thinking Google’s massive marketing campaign and the quality of the browser are the real reasons for its success.

I realise that looks the wrong way round. Palm is the smaller company. The weedy David to Apple’s giant Goliath. But each time the chance to go to war with a company several times its size has been presented, Palm has reached for it with both hands like a 19-stone man lunging for cake.

I’m talking, in case you’re not following the smartphone market as closely as you should, about Palm’s moronic battle to keep the Pre compatible with iTunes.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes again, a development so tedious it may as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

The story so far goes like this. Palm releases the Pre in June. One of the claims the marketers made at the time was that it was compatible with iTunes. It was a sort of hook to get iTunes or iPhone users to think about transferring because they wouldn’t have to change their music software.

But iTunes is only for Apple hardware. It’s a bit silly, I grant you, but it’s Apple’s software and I suppose Apple can do whatever it wants with it. It could make iTunes only compatible with people whose names began with ‘H’, if it wanted.

So a few weeks later Apple releases iTunes 8.2.1. If you had a Pre and you upgraded iTunes, iTunes would no longer work with your handset.

Then Palm released a new version of the Pre’s firmware, and iTunes started working again.

Then Apple released iTunes 9, and the Pre was once again incompatible.

It’s at this point everyone watching began gnawing the side of their hands and wishing that Palm, or Apple, or ideally both, would vanish off the face of the planet.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes 9 again, a development so monumentally tedious and predictable it might as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

Then there’s the very questionable wisdom of getting into a scrap with one of the world’s most successful smartphone manufacturers at a time when your own survival is anything but guaranteed. Palm is a company which had to clarify a few days ago that it wasn’t laying people off. No, it’s “better aligning our staff with our business objectives,” which could mean anything. And even if it’s not firing people, it lost $164.5 million dollars in the first quarter of 2009, and that’s bad news however you look at it.

The constant tit-for-tat is being started by Palm every time. It’s bad for the Pre’s image, not least because those likely to buy it – consumers – are unlikely to tolerate repeatedly being shut out of iTunes while Palm scrambles to release another update for long. Palm should let iTunes go and leave Apple alone. It has enough problems already.