Joshua Topolsky:

why didn’t HP just wait a month on this thing? What was the rush to bring an unfinished product to market? Why suffer the bad reviews and initial customer disappointment? Were there retailer pressures here or some other situation we’re not aware of, or was HP simply so hot to trot on getting this product to market that they sabotaged its launch?

It’s a bit odd. And, it is a curious situation. I have to assume that the majority of TouchPad reviews would have been overwhelmingly positive if it had launched with all of the improvements in 3.0.2.

And, here’s Joshua Topolsky’s reaction to the 3.0.2 update in terms of improvements over the previous software version:

The TouchPad post the 3.0.2 update feels much more like the device it was supposed to be. Snappy, tight, sure of itself. When you press the screen or scroll a list (particularly in the mail application, which has been improved) you get what you expect. The keyboard changes may be the most significant here — the onscreen keyboard is not only improved over the previous version, but so accurate that it may just be my favorite tablet keyboard yet. The auto-correction and predictive text input is excellent.

In other words, things are a lot better. And it’s better late then never, I suppose. But, HP’s going to have a hard time digging themselves out of the hole that initial reviews dug for them.