HP is finally ready to unleash its response to the iPad.

HP’s TouchPad tablet will go on sale in the United States on July 1 this year, and will cost $500 for the 16-GB model and $600 for 32GB.

A few days later it will launch in France, Germany and the UK. Canada will get the tablet in mid-July and Italy, Spain, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore will have to wait until “later this year.”

After a rash of frankly awful Android tablets, and BlackBerry’s absurd premature launch of the PlayBook, many think that the TouchPad will be the first real rival to the iPad. From the face-to-face (no touching allowed) demos we have seen, this could certainly be the case. The price is right, too, hitting the exact same marks as Apple.

The TouchPad is certainly the tablet I’m excited about, and despite the new features of iOS 5, it still appears to outdo the iPad in some ways. The notification and Touchstone tech (which lets you share content by bumping the TouchPad up against your Pre phone) don’t look so great now that Apple has its own notifications and iCloud, but the card-based app switching and stereo speakers are both real wins.

It also comes with a beta version of Adobe’s Flash browser plugin (some meaner people might say that all versions of Flash are beta).

Otherwise, things are just as we already knew. The TouchPad runs the web OS operating system developed by Palm, which HP acquired last year. The 9.7-inch screen sports a sensible 1024 x 768 display, much better for tablets than the tallscreen aspects seen in many Android tablets. There’s also the 1.3MP webcam on the front, which embarrasses the iPad’s sub-megapixel rear-facing camera, the dual-core 1.2-GHz Snapdragon processor, and the 740-gram weight (the Wi-Fi iPad weighs 601 grams, or 1.33 pounds).

Should you want to get your hands on a TouchPad on launch day, you can pre order from June 19th. A 3G (AT&T) model will arrive later in the summer.

Touchpad product page [HP]

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