The PC giant Hewlett-Packard has accused Blackberry mobile maker Research In Motion (RIM) of copying its tablet TouchPad UI. According to HP, RIM’s PlayBook tablet uses some of the design elements first seen in Palm’s WebOS.

RIM’s tablet which is set to hit the market before HP’s competing tablet TouchPad, reportedly uses the fast app switching which has been a hallmark of WebOS since it debuted on smartphones. Both tablets are believed to manage apps as cards, allowing users to swipe between them as they run in the background. The two tablets also reportedly have similar swipe gestures, allowing users to swipe apps off the screen.

Jon Oakes, director of product marketing, TouchPad, told Laptop mag on the issue “From what we’ve seen in the market, there are some uncanny similarities. It’s a fast innovation cycle and a fast imitation cycle in this market, so we just know that we have the creative engine here to continue to build on what we have, and we’ll keep innovating, we’ll keep honing and those guys hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year.”
Jeff McDowell, senior vice president for business and platform marketing, RIM reportedly said in response, “I feel that we set out from the ground up to define a user experience that we felt would delight our customers, and we landed in a place that may look like other competitive devices. But there was no intention and no preconceived notion that this is what we want to end up looking like. In fact, I think QNX had that design lined up before we even started working with them.”

“You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel, and when you’re trying to come up with the best coefficient to drag ratio, there’s one optimized shape that gets the best wind resistance, right? Well, when you’re trying to optimize user experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs,” McDowell added.