Still desperate to carry the fight in the tablet pitch, HP inked an agreement with application development agency Grapple Mobile to enable their clients’ brands, businesses and agencies develop application for the HP TouchPad. Grapple marks the first developer to ever build applications on TouchPad, and also the world’s first agency to be embedding it to their cross-platform product.

The tablet experience offered by HP, boasting a 9.7 inch capacitive multi-touch display, flash capability and front-facing camera, answers consumer demands for content rich, feature led applications. The problem with HP right now is that it does not have a developer community as eager as the ones from Android and Apple, thus closing the deal with Grapple. Grapple mobile was said to be good in partnering with companies, businesses and brands, creating application for them.

“We are committed to working with the best international app developers and to ensuring that HP customers are getting access to a wide range of high quality apps for the HP TouchPad. Grapple Mobile will play a significant role in helping us to achieve this aim.”

Grapple has a good amount of expertise having able to come up with products such as the award-winning Fable III mobile app with Microsoft and Lionhead Studios. It also developed a cross-platform hospitality app for Premier Inn hotel chains.

“Our clients want the ability to create the best possible applications on the most relevant platforms to reach their target audience, and to drive their business objectives. As tablets of all kinds become more prevalent and popular amongst the mainstream it is crucial for us to incorporate them into our fully cross-platform offering.”

We can clearly see where HP’s coming from. However, it is more apparent that the TouchPad came on too late to the market, running on a mediocre operating system while the market’s already been dominated by the iPad, Galaxy Tab and Xoom. It would be nice to see the tablet OS competition go beyond Apple and Android, but it would be pretty difficult to gamble on, given WebOS’ lack of developer support. They need developers for their webOS platform. They don’t stand a strong stance against them if they don’t position themselves well in the market. App markets have become the marketplaces consumers reach for, and if HP can’t access this growing marketplace through webOS, consumers won’t adopt the platform at all.

Aside from Grapple mobile, HPs latest partner to develop an award winning multi-lingual apps for HP’s webOS and the new HP TouchPad is WingedChariot.