These six tablets span four operating systems, multiple screen sizes and a range of connectivity features. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

In today’s crowded market, looking for a tablet is like buying a new car. Everything looks great when it’s slick, polished and sitting on the lot. The hard part is keeping track of what’s under the hood.

Wired.com took some of the front-runners from the current tablet field — the brand-new HP TouchPad, Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and others — and stacked up their features side by side in the chart below.

In the wake of Apple’s iPad, which released April 2...

When the chips are down and the cards have been dealt, do you go big or go home?

With the debut of its TouchPad tablet, HP’s answer is clear: “We’re all in, baby.”

As a hardware device, it’s competitive and solid. The software is impressive — it sports webOS, the company’s proprietary mobile platform. But the real question is, when drawing down against other tablets, does HP have a winning hand?

First things first: In the tablet market, hardware specs alone don’t win the war. Tablets from all of the major contenders — Apple, Motorola, RIM, Samsung — boast similar stats. Things like dual-core proc...