Beating the world’s favorite tablet is no easy task, even for a giant like Hewlett-Packard. The leading computer manufacturing company will soon launch the TouchPad—a tablet they dubbed as the “iPad killer”.  To avoid any further stumbles as their business model still hangs in the balance, HP is equipping the TouchPad with apps and the latest would be a new digital content service that will include music and video. They plan to stuff these features into their upcoming tablet before hitting the market July 1^st.

HP’s webOS platform will be central for HP’s ability to deliver consumer products via the cloud. Obviously, the webOS 3.0 tablet TouchPad will be one of the biggest projects that the company is introducing this year as the company pushes for a new world of services to keep up with the acceleration of the booming SaaS industry. Through media, HP will be able to develop and launch more cloud solutions that could be incorporated in their consumer-facing products, a good combo for HP, as it’s already had a strong consumer sector for several years.

But HP is not alone in this quest. In an article, Adam Klein of eMusic mentioned that “ the company hopes to launch some sort of locker service in the final quarter of this year, adding that he thinks his bigger competitors “are doing exactly the right thing” by moving into the access-your-content-anywhere space.” eMusic is planning to hit the cloud sphere by second half of 2011. The cloud-based service will permit customers to stream the songs they own to multiple devices.

The question now as HP joins the digital bandwagon is whether it will follow Apple or Google or Amazon’s path.  If it favors Apple and Spotify’s route, they have to secure licenses from various music labels to anchor their cloud-based media services. This is aside from the fact that they will be in competition with leaders in the US and European markets, and will have to match Apple’s iTunes/iCloud and Spotify’s freemium services. Should HP chooses Google and Amazon’s course, no licenses are required and they would be able to get their engines moving and meet cloud storage demand, where they are on the rise according to reports.