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The first reviews of HP's TouchPad tablet are in and if I were Jon Rubenstein I'd be worried. The TouchPad was one the most anticipated devices of the year, but there was a palpable sense of disappointment in most of the reviews I read. Several noted a number of issues with the device, including relatively poor battery life, surprisingly buggy software, a relatively paltry selection of apps, and, to top it all off, that it's actually heavier and bulkier than just about every other rival device. I don't think I saw a single review recommending that people run out and buy one -- or even one offering any compelling reasons why someone might buy one over the alternatives.

It wasn't all bad, of course. Most everyone liked webOS's elegance, and many described the TouchPad as being "promising" or "having potential", something that HP's Jon Rubinstein seized on in an email to his team attempting to lift morale in the face of all these tepid reviews. The problem is that it's not enough for webOS to be something that might potentially be good someday. We've been hearing about webOS's promise ever since it was first unveiled way back in January of 2009, and ever since then we've seen device after device that has failed to live up to the potential of the thoughtful OS powering it.

Yes, last year's acquisition of Palm by HP probably put the brakes on things for a little while, but, if you want to win, at some point you have to stop playing catch up and start getting ahead of your competitors. By the time HP issues software updates to address several of the TouchPad's most glaring problems, there's a good chance that Apple will have launched a third-generation iPad, one that might put HP even further behind the market leader. HP needed a game-changing, head-turning entry if they wanted to compete in the tablet wars, and it's hard to imagine them grabbing a sizable slice of the market with something that's just OK.

This puts HP, which made webOS the center of its mobile and connected device strategy when it bought Palm, in a difficult position. As I wrote in the newsletter last fall, HP simply cannot afford to be marginalized in the mobile space. If the TouchPad doesn't succeed -- and my guess is that it will only sell in modest numbers -- they're going to be even further behind than they already are. Remember, they made a big bet by going with their own platform rather than just using someone else's OS, but it looks fairly clear that the TouchPad isn't going to have the impact they wanted, at least not anytime soon.

So what happens now? Here are a few things HP might do, not all of which are mutually exclusive:

1. Cut its losses and get out.

I think this is unlikely given how much they've already invested into webOS as both a platform and a strategy, but it's entirely possible that HP CEO Leo Apotheker will decide to abandon it and go with something else for mobile devices. Why? Well, if you believe that webOS is unlikely to ever grab more than a few points of marketshare then there's no way to justify the massive investment in developing and maintaining your own operating system. They pinned their hopes on webOS, but it wouldn't be the first time a major player had to concede that they couldn't make it on their own (see Nokia). But, as I said, I think this is unlikely to happen.

2. Cut the price of the TouchPad

Here's the thing: it's not just enough to come up with something that's about as good as the iPad. You have to give consumers a compelling reason to buy your product over the alternatives, and apart from a nice UI there don't seem to be a whole lot of reasons to buy a TouchPad over an iPad or even a Honeycomb tablet. As painful as it would be for HP's bottom line, they probably should have priced the TouchPad at $399 and positioned it as an iPad-quality tablet without the iPad price. It's not hard to see plenty more people deciding to buy one at that price and it'd give them a very clear point of differentiation with the iPad.

3. Double down and do whatever it takes to make the TouchPad great -- just don't take too long to do it

Cutting the price would help things, but if HP doesn't want to cut its margin they absolutely need to improve the product (doing both would be even better). Samsung responded to the iPad 2 by reworking the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to make it thinner and lighter, and, even if it was painful, it was probably the right thing to do.

HP has already poured a lot of money and effort into webOS, but it doesn't look like those efforts are going to pay off in this first-generation TouchPad, which means they're going to need to spend even more time and money to make some drastic improvements to both its hardware and software -- and do it quickly, since the TouchPad was already late to the game. Along the way, they absolutely need to come up with some killer features to differentiate it from the other tablets out there, too (things like Touch-To-Share are a good start, but probably not enough). That won't be easy, but that shouldn't be impossible for a company with the slogan "Invent".

4. Do more to attract developers

As much as we focus on the devices themselves, this is ultimately a battle between ecosystems, and to win that battle you need a big library of quality apps. The challenge there is that you get this chicken-and-egg problem where users don't want devices without apps and devs don't want to make apps for devices without users. If you can get over that hump, like Android and iOS have, you can create something of a network effect that can really drive platform adoption, but it's a really hard thing to do and it's not totally clear how many different ecosystems that market can or will support.

I don't doubt that HP has been working really hard at attracting developers and it looks like they've gotten more apps built for the TouchPad than Google has for Honeycomb. However, they're still not anywhere close to the number of apps for the iPad, and you can't really blame devs for focusing on those platforms where they think they can make the most money. Offering good, easy-to-use development tools and doing tons of outreach is important, but until webOS reaches some kind of critical mass HP probably doesn't have a ton of options besides just paying people to make apps for their platform. Microsoft has done this with Windows Phone, and, while it hasn't magically solved all their problems, it has helped them grow their app catalog to a pretty decent size quickly considering how small its userbase is.

5. Find partners

There are already some rumblings that HP would like to license webOS to third parties like Samsung that might be afraid of becoming overly reliant on Google and Microsoft. Would this be a smart thing for HP to do? Well, it would certainly help them reach the scale that webOS needs, but it also would put HP in the awkward position of building and selling webOS devices that would compete against those of its licensees. This, of course, is exactly the position that Palm found itself in just over a decade ago, and the result then was a disastrous split of the company into a hardware business and an OS business. I'm not sure that history would repeat itself, but deciding to license webOS to other manufacturers isn't as simple as just handing them some code. It'd require HP to adjust its entire strategy, and having to keep partners happy may actually slow down their ability to innovate and roll out new improvements to both the OS and hardware.

6. Focus on enterprise

After last week's reviews there were a handful of interviews with HP execs insisting that they weren't going after the iPad at all and that the TouchPad's true target was enterprise users. Positioning the TouchPad as an enterprise device could potentially be a good way to segment the market (Cisco is definitely doing this and RIM is sort of trying to do this). One of HP's advantages here is that it already has sales relationships with tons and tons of companies of all sizes, and I'm sure they will try to position the TouchPad as a secure, enterprise-ready option that'll work with existing infrastructure.

If enterprise is HP's real focus, should they even pay much attention to the consumer market? It's a tough question to answer, but it may be difficult to do both at the same time. While there is obviously going to be a lot of overlap, what businesses will need out of a tablet will often be very different than what consumers are looking for. You can't just declare that your tablet is "enterprise-ready" and sell them bundled with laptops and servers, you have to make sure that your product supports the security and management tools that any decently-sized company is going to need before it feels comfortable deploying a new piece of hardware to its employees. It sounds like HP is making a big push here, but even they admit that the pieces aren't all in place yet and so it may be a long time before enterprise IT departments feel comfortable making that investment. Could HP gain an edge over Apple by focusing entirely on the needs of enterprise customers?

What happens next?

Introducing a better product at a better price with tons of apps and all sorts of fancy new features is a tall order, but it's basically table stakes if you want to make a dent in the burgeoning tablet market. For better or for worse, Apple is doing so much better than everyone else that the tablet market may end up like the portable media player market was a few years back, with one product (i.e. the iPod) dominating everyone else. That would be an absolutely awful outcome, and while its encouraging that there are so many companies trying to compete, fighting to be second-best is not exactly inspiring. I don't know what HP will do next, but I do know that if they want to make webOS anything more than a footnote in history they need to start delivering on those promises.