7-inch TouchPad pops up in China, never to make it to retailers near you

We’ve seen all sorts of mini-leaks and FCC unveilings about the 7-inch webOS tablet known as the TouchPad Opal/Go. The unannounced tablet was supposed to be the smaller-but-just-as-capable brother to the currently available (sorta) 10-inch TouchPad, but it just couldn’t make it to the market before HP dropped the ax on webOS hardware development.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t at least a few testing versions of the tablet out there, and indeed, there is at least one. The TouchPad Go popped up on the Chinese ZooPDA forums, and some of what we knew was confirmed, and other new bits were revealed.

Here’s what we know about this never-to-see-the-light-of-day webOS tablet: It has a 7-inch 1024x768 screen (same pixel count as the bigger 10-inch TouchPad), one of the few 4:3 displays in this size category. Inside is a 1.5GHz Snapdragon chip (likely the same in the white 64GB TouchPad) and 16GB of storage. The back appears to be a grippy soft-touch plastic and, behold, a rear facing camera with flash!

The TouchPad Go looks like it would have been an intriguing tablet to hit the market – all of the power of a larger TouchPad, but in a smaller and tighter package. But alas, that day will never come. We’ll just continue to gaze longingly at this Chinese rarity from our computer screens. A few more pictures after the break.

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