HP Drops Price Again For Its WebOS-Based iPad Challenger

oxide7 writes with this selection from IBT: "Hewlett Packard reduced the price of its TouchPad tablet computer again, highlighting the uphill battle manufacturers will need to overcome as they go head-to-head against the dominant Apple iPad line of tablets. Much of a tablet's success is based on the ecosystem of apps that is available to the end-user. HP is far behind Apple or even the No.2 tablet platform, Google's Android."

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God forbid someone post first-person on-topic info

[xeno]

Based on very positive experience with the Palm Pre, my s.o. bought HP's 32gb Touchpad when it came out, and loves it. She just wooted another during this weekend's HP sales -- partly for the kids, and partly for experimenting with all the homebrew geekery. From a purely consumer perspective, the Touchpad rocks. On the plus side, the hardware is top-notch, with build quality as good or better than the iPad2. WebOS is truly inspired & makes iOS and Honeycomb look a little crusty. (A game of leapfrog, I know, but currently WebOS is clearly on top in terms of usability and extensibility). On the downside, I do miss having video out and a microSD slot. Iirc only Asus officially offers USB host, but it's been provided on other devices thru their communities -- I trust WebOS community efforts will exploit the MicroUSB port.

Other cool things? Going supernOOb with JustType to have it figure out what app is best for what I need to find. Then in the next breath going supergeek and installing the UbuntuChroot environment, realizing that there are thousands of "apps" available, and firing up a full office suite (OpenOffice) in an Xwindow. My bet is that our second Touchpad will have Backtrack 5 on it within an hour of arrival. I find it interesting that the Touchpad converges both the best un-geeky grandma-friendly UI (besting even the vaunted iOS), while sweeping in vast tracts of uber-geeky tools and capabilities (lands once occupied by Maemo and MeeGo) into one unified experience.

Lack of apps? Not a problem. The as-shipped config is tremendously well-thought-out, and most core apps are there. I find it hilarious when iPad-toting friends show me a "super awesome gottahaveit app" they paid $$ for... and it's essentially a browser bookmark on the desktop. Thanks, I'll take the Touchpad's skinny app catalog over iOS's app store full of thousands of iLighter/joke apps and paid-bookmark suckerware.

This rocks. Go, HP, Go!