HP / Palm webOS Tablet UI Details Leak, Look Fantastic

Anyone excited about the HP Topaz webOS tablet will be downright giddy after reading this latest news. The folks at PreCentral have received some leaked slides of the new webOS Tablet interface. Is it hot?

Hell yeah.

First: New Gestures. Double-Tap, Tap & Drag, Tap & Hold, 2 finger tap and 2 finger tap with drag are all coming to Palm tablets. There will be pop-up text selection dialogues that go up when you make certain gestures to allow for copy/past and similar options.

The new webOS virtual keyboard is the coolest bit of news. It features a top toolbar that you can customize with all sorts of functions. Hide keyboard, jump between form fields, and step through all characters were explicitly mentioned. A keyboard like this would be fantastic for gaming.

The updated mail interface will support panels, with lists on the left and content on the right. Tabs and pages are coming to the web browser, no surprise there. But HP has also developed a weird paged interface that allows you to treat your different web sites as pages in a book.

It also looks like pop-up dialog boxes will be how Palm tablets handle a lot of their multitasking. The Google Maps UI is also set for a big update, though exactly what that will entail is unclear. We're likely to see the Topaz at MWC 2011, so think of this as a little appetizer before next month's webOS feast.

[via Pre Central]