HP Officially Out of TouchPads

First time accepted submitter AtomicAdam writes "I guess all that waiting and hoping was in vain. HP just sent out an email officially claiming to be out of TouchPads. 'Dear Valued Customer: Making sure customers have a positive experience when they purchase our products is a priority for us. In some cases, limited inventory makes it challenging to fulfill all customer orders. As you signed up for updates on the HP TouchPad, we wanted you to know that we are officially out of stock. Some retailers will have some stock available, but our online inventory is depleted.'"

Comments

Employees

[Anonymous Coward]

I had heard that this manufacturing run would be offered for sale to employees first. So does this mean they were all bought up by employees?

Re:Employees

[ctnp]

Apparently, I signed up to be notified if they ever released them for retail sale and got no updates, except for a "we're first offering them for sale (for a limited time) to employees" email. Nothing since.

Re:Employees

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I recieved the two I ordered.

Re:Employees

[CheshireDragon]

No, I bought about 30 of the damn things and they arrived within 1 and 2 weeks. I don't and never have worked for HP. I guess you weren't in the know.

Uh

[transami]

That's not all they're out of!

Re:Uh

[Gaygirlie]

Yeah, toilet paper is always good to keep around in plenty!

No they didnt.

[Kotoku]

They did not actually, they just wont sell them to you. That is unless you buy an hp computer bundle through best buy. http://www.google.com/m/url?ei=LWqrTvi6CZOMlgfMbA&q=http://www.slashgear.com/best-buy-offers-new-hp-touchpad-bundle-deal-28191812/&ved=0CCMQqQIwAw&usg=AFQjCNEJfEDLbDNEDHTspYRHuXTN1ylM9Q

Re:No they didnt.

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFS: "Some retailers will have some stock available, but our online inventory is depleted."

HP != retailers

Re:No they didnt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats Bestbuy's stock right? not HP's. Hp is who is out

Re:No they didnt.

[Kotoku]

Best buy was out of stock, they haven't had touchpads for at least 45 days, Hp replenished it from their latest 200k production run and said to hell with their waiting list. The only reason they are doing it through retailers is to save face.

Last Batch

[skine]

In the firesale, I ordered about a half dozen Touchpads from various websites, and the only one that ended up coming through was from HP Small/Medium Business.

I ordered on August 21st, and I received September 21st.

Re:Last Batch

[JWSmythe]

    Odd, I bought 3 from BestBuy that morning. They were all shipped from different distribution centers, but they all arrived within a week.

Price Point

[SilverHatHacker]

Does this count as irrefutable proof that $500 is more than most people are willing to spend for a tablet, but $100-200 is perfectly reasonable? Perhaps not irrefutable, but still, maybe some other tech companies will take notice.

Re:Price Point

[hawguy]

Does this count as irrefutable proof that $500 is more than most people are willing to spend for a tablet, but $100-200 is perfectly reasonable? Perhaps not irrefutable, but still, maybe some other tech companies will take notice.

I wonder if any other companies will notice?

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Something at the right price will always sell, they just had the wrong price. Irrefutable enough for me.

Re:Price Point

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

No, it's irrefutable proof that the tablets out there so far aren't worth $500.

Re:Price Point

[larry bagina]

Last quarter, Apple sold 11 million iPads. Motorola sold 100,000 zooms.

Re:Price Point

[Telvin_3d]

No, it's proof that people will only buy non-apple tablets when they can get $500 of hardware for $100.

That's not the same as a $100 tablet.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

No tablet out there costs anywhere near $500 to make. Tablets are horrendously overpriced. The samsung galaxy Tab 10.1 costs around $170 to manufacture. The iPad 2 costs even less.

Re:Price Point

[Ethanol-fueled]

A decent tablet that would allow all the perks of a full-fledged OS (say, access to all hardware resources and compiling and running your own unsigned applications without registering and paying a fee) instead of a locked-down phone-like OS would be worth $500 or more, especially if it were manufactured by Apple.

A big, glorified demi-phone like the iPad is worth $200-300 tops in the eyes of the tech-savvy consumer. Now its on HP and others to undercut the faddists and pull common-sense miracles out of their asses.

Re:Price Point

[tverbeek]

It's proof that $500 is more than people will pay for a tablet that is not an iPad.

HP's PC business is sound, because they sell their not-as-good-as-an-Apple computers, running a more-popular OS, for less than an Apple. Trying to sell a device that is no better than an Apple, running a less popular OS, for the same price as Apple's... was idiotic. If they couldn't sell it for less (due to manufacturing/distribution costs and profit margins), they never should have put it into production in the first place.

Re:Price Point

[dgatwood]

No, it's proof that people will only buy non-apple tablets when they can get $500 of hardware for $100.

No, it's proof that when you have two products at the same price point, one of which is inferior in almost every way—bigger, heavier, no rear-facing camera, slower CPU (or maybe it's just the higher overhead of WebOS), no native apps, limited selection of apps, less display brightness—people will choose the better product.... About the only hardware advantage the TouchPad had was stereo speakers....

If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.

If you're going to compete at a price point, you have to at least come close to hitting all the major bullet-point hardware features of the other products at that price point. If not, expect your sales to be disappointing. The only time this isn't true is if you have some other major design enhancement that blows away the competition in some other area, and even then, it takes years for something that subtle to result in significant disruption in an established market. It's unclear whether HP had that with WebOS. What is clear is that they were not willing to stick it out in that market long enough to find out.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO Not as good computers??? Most of them are actually better computers for a lower price.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

did you buy one?
if not, you have nothing to worry about.

You sound like one of those guys at the edge of a toyota lot saying how no one would pay $23K for a prius when you can get a perfectly functional taurus that does more across the street.... just not getting it...

Re:Price Point

[Pence128]

You call that a cheap tablet? This is a cheap tablet. Yours has a higher res screen though.

Re:Price Point

[Osgeld]

yea ok if your computer is a pentium 3

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends.... I'm not an Apple fan, but I've been looking for an e-reader, and so far, the iPad2 is one of the few serious options for programming books and scientific papers. I mean, it's not exactly suited to the task, but many other tablets are just impossible.

The market for tablets is shit, imo... and the iPad is like a half-digested and semi-palatable turd.

Re:Price Point

[symbolset]

Well something like two thirds of the market is iPads that cost $500 at least, and I'm pretty sure the Transformer Prime will sell well at that price. So no, $500 is not more than "most people" are willing to spend today. When the Kindle Fire comes out we will see how that goes. A _lot_ of people have been asking my thoughts on the Kindle fire - far more than asked about any other tablet.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

The samsung galaxy Tab 10.1 costs around $170 to manufacture. The iPad 2 costs even less.

I think you meant to say the iPad 2 costs almost twice as much, but spelled a couple words completely wrong. The bill of materials is $326.60.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-14/tech/30012225_1_ipad-apple-stores-pa-semi

Re:Price Point

[jo_ham]

Funnily enough, the "zomg all iPads/iPods/iPhones/XBox360s/PS3s/Prius/Starbucks/Round Glasses/Doc Martens/Anything Not Blessed By The Slashdot KnowAlls are being bought by people sold on the hype" argument is just weak. Good one on "faddists" though - that's relatively new.

On the topic of HP "undercutting" the iPad, do you not think that someone at the company (or anyone with any connection to a company capable of building a tablet) hasn't thought of that? So far the closest anyone has come is the Eee Pad Transformer at $100 under the iPad. They're just not cheap things to make at the moment.

Re:Price Point

[jo_ham]

I can see why you didn't log in - nothing you said is true. But nice try.

Re:Price Point

[ryanov]

The sound is excellent -- it's not just stereo speakers. That is one of my favorite features.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, it's running 1.6 (Donut).

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf does anyone need a rear camera on a tablet for, are you going to go around using it as a camera? The processor on the TouchPad is faster than the iPad 2 has (1.2Ghz dual-core vs 1Ghz dual-core), and that processor is under-clocked from it's rated speed of 1.5Ghz. Ask anyone who has used a TouchPad and they will tell you that it is quite responsive, especially since the WebOS updates came out. The TouchPad has flash support, iPad 2 doesn't. The only thing the iPad has over the TouchPad is a larger selection of apps. And that's no longer an issue since you can put Android 2.3.7 on it now (not to mention PreWare), and ICS will be on it at a later date. Not that WebOS is bad (it's not), it's only being abandoned because HP's previous CEO had his head up his ass. Had it been kept on the market a few months longer sales would have picked up, especially during the holiday season.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

I guarantee that Apple is not paying anywhere near $326.60 in parts for each iPad 2, not in the quantities they buy those parts in. That $326.60 price point is what it would cost to buy those parts yourself.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed is not simply measured by Mhz alone. Here is a side by side review of the Ipad vs touchpad:

The iPad 2's 1GHz dual-core Apple A5 processor makes quick work of app loading and is generally responsive, such as when panning in Google Earth or parsing documents in iWork Pages. By contrast, despite its 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, the TouchPad feels slow -- even for tasks like opening emails that are practically instantaneous on other tablets. That slowness is in evidence throughout the tablet; even network-based actions like downloading files takes longer on the TouchPad than on the iPad 2, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Xoom -- including on the same network from the same location. The slowness is epecially noticeable at the first launch of an application or document. The TouchPad's speed also seems to vary, as if some invisible background process is executing. HP says some slowdown can occur after accounts are set up, as the TouchPad's Synergy API weaves them into services and applications that can support them. But these slowdowns have persisted for a week, so I doubt that answer. Whatever the cause, it's annoying.

In some instances, as when launching applications, the TouchPad gives you an indication that it's working, but in others, it seems to take a few seconds before it indicates that it received your input and is processing it. I frequently would tap a button again because I couldn't tell that anything was happening.

There are extremely few TouchPad apps available to see if this speed issue extends to them. But the TouchPad is definitely slow to start up from powered-off state: It takes 77 seconds -- more than a minute. By comparison, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 takes 25 seconds, the iPad 2 takes 35 seconds, and my 2011-edition MacBook Pro takes 127 seconds. If you're looking for instant-on, let the tablet go to sleep rather than powering it down.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you need a rear camera on a tablet for? Well, I use mine on my iPad2 when video-chatting and I want to show the other person something I'm looking at without flipping the whole thing around and not being able to see their reaction ... which is, you know, kinda one of the points of video chat.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you "guarantee"? Prove it then.

Re:Price Point

[MagusSlurpy]

How often do you actually need that function?

Re:Price Point

[MagusSlurpy]

Or a smartphone.

Re:Price Point

[farble1670]

pure hardware companies aren't interested in selling their hardware at a loss, or even at break-even. they might as well not put the effort into making it in the first place

Re:Price Point

[sortius_nod]

said by someone who's never video chatted with anyone.

You'd never ask that question if you'd ever partaken in the activity.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

That slowness was fixed with an update to WebOS, and that review is outdated.

Re:Price Point

[farble1670]

If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.

i like this analogy: ipad is the mercedes (or whatever) of tablets. sure people buy lots of hondas, they are good cars. but they they don't pay mercedes prices for them.

Re:Price Point

[MagusSlurpy]

No, I just use it to talk to people because I am talking to them, not showing them stupid crap around the room or work. Maybe it's a developed habit because turning my laptop around is such a difficult maneuver. . . wait, no it isn't. Must just be because I'm not showing them stupid crap.

Re:Price Point

[anomaly256]

nah THIS is a cheap tablet

Re:Price Point

[shutdown -p now]

so far, the iPad2 is one of the few serious options for programming books and scientific papers. I mean, it's not exactly suited to the task, but many other tablets are just impossible.

For this particular task, it sounds like all you would really care about is screen quality and size, since otherwise they can all display PDFs and ePubs. If so, then why not any of Android tablets? You could even get a 7" one - it'll likely be more convenient to hold when reading (iPad and other 10" tablets are too heavy to hold in one hand for too long), while still having the same resolution.

Though, frankly, even Honeycomb's 800x1280 is not all that good for PDFs (page fit to screen), much less iPad's 768x1024. If PDF uses font too small, it's barely readable. I'd want something at least 1024 pixels wide, and preferably sized to match A4 paper.

Re:Price Point

[shutdown -p now]

no native apps

I'm pretty sure I've seen numerous claims that webOS has native code apps, and specifically SDL is available - so porting games is a piece of cake.

Re:Price Point

[Pieroxy]

Does this count as irrefutable proof that $500 is more than most people are willing to spend for a tablet, but $100-200 is perfectly reasonable? Perhaps not irrefutable, but still, maybe some other tech companies will take notice.

Hmm, not at all. It's proof that the cheaper, the more you sell. But we didn't really need proof of that now, did we?

Re:Price Point

[SuricouRaven]

I think the Classic was more fun.

Re:Price Point

[SuricouRaven]

You can get almost there with some of the Android tablets. They can run unsigned applications without registering or paying a fee... but you don't get root access, and need to use some form of exploit to gain it, a practice that Google seems to be willing to turn a blind eye to. You do need to beware of the manufacturer's own tricks, as they sometimes use things like putting the OS image in read-only flash to prevent the user from uninstalling the bundled crap they get paid to install.

The current business situation just isn't conducive to a PC-like, do-as-you-wish tablet.

Re:Price Point

[JWSmythe]

If you want to argue that, you have absolutely no clue how wholesale purchasing works...

    If I buy something in a bulk of 1, well, I get pretty close to retail pricing, even if it's from a wholesale outlet. If I buy 1,000, it gets better. When we get over 100,000, the manufacturer will pretty much bend over backwards to satisfy you. Of course, when you start pushing the pricing down below their cost, that's when it gets farmed out to China.

Re:Price Point

[SuricouRaven]

Look into the Asus Transformer. It's specs and price (if you get the dock) are about the same as the iPad2. Runs Android. I've been happily using it as a e-reader since I got it, handles thousand-page PDFs no problem. Nice big screen, yet light enough to hold comfortably. Also good for watching Friendship is Magic on the train and getting strange looks from other passengers. I even put it in a watertight plastic bag to read in the bath. It's about as good as you're going to get right now for a high-end tablet as an e-reader.

Re:Price Point

[jimicus]

I think what's happening is that everyone else saw Apple price the iPad at around $500, and concluded that this was a benchmark price. Either that or Apple have tied up the supply chain so efficiently that it's very hard for other manufacturers to offer something similar for much less money.

In any case, for whatever reason everyone else decided "We can build one of those and flog it at a good profit at $500". The neglected one important point.

Apple can sell it at $500 because they've spent the last fifteen years re-establishing themselves in people's minds as manufacturers of beautifully designed, easy to operate products that sell at a premium price because they're worth paying a premium for - and if something does go wrong, they'll sort it out. (Note I'm talking about public perception here, not how accurate you believe this perception to be).

Every other manufacturer has spent the last fifteen years in a desperate race to the bottom. To hell with quality, if we can shave a few cents off the price here, another few cents off the price there and outsource support to India, we can sell this for $2/£2/€2 cheaper than the previous model. It's not unusual to find that well-known OEMs have "consumer" and "business" lines - the "business" products are more expensive, but you ring up support with a serial number that identifies it as a business product and you don't find yourself calling India. Not only that, but they'll send a man out with a screwdriver next day rather than expect you to pack up the product and ship it to a repair facility that has a 3 week lead time on repairs. But you don't find the business products for sale at your local retailer.

So the consumers who might buy a tablet computer see the Apple product on the shelf for $499, and the HP equivalent on the shelf also for $499. They remember their last HP laptop which broke down (fair enough, can happen to anyone), the two hours they spent on the phone to India and the three weeks they were without the laptop - and when it finally came back it had been wiped and reloaded, even though there was nothing the matter with the disk - and compare that with when their friend's iPhone broke down. Apparently, 20 minutes at the Apple store and it was replaced with a new one, with everything copied across beautifully. Which item do they think is worth $499?

Re:Price Point

[SuricouRaven]

You can't really fault Apple on the build quality of their computers. You can fault them for the computers being hard to upgrade, overpriced, for getting screwed if you try to buy upgrade from Apple. But actually building the computers out of quality parts, well assembled and running very reliably? They do that well. And when you're paying twice as much as you would for an equivilent spec PC, I should hope so too.

Re:Price Point

[John Bresnahan]

This is an even cheaper tablet.

Re:Price Point

[Oakey]

They do if they're badged 'NSX'

Re:Price Point

[TheRaven64]

Actually, if you had proof of that in the general case, then you'd be inline for something like the nobel for economics (yes, not a real nobel, I know). See: Giffen Goods, Veblen Goods.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

A big, glorified demi-phone like the iPad is worth $200-300 tops in the eyes of the tech-savvy consumer.

And 2012 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

Re:Price Point

[Pieroxy]

Actually, if you had proof of that in the general case, then you'd be inline for something like the nobel for economics (yes, not a real nobel, I know). See: Giffen Goods, Veblen Goods.

Do you mean to say that there is somewhere someone doubting that slashing the price by 80% on an existing product does raise the sales number?

Re:Price Point

[TheRaven64]

Did you look up the terms I mentioned? Yes, in some cases lowering the price of a good can reduce its sales.

Re:Price Point

[slackergod]

it's kinda funny, but webOS comes/came pretty close to what you're describing. Root was accessible by enabling "dev" mode through a special but officially documented code (the konami code for some versions), no cracking needed; the underlying linux os had a number of gnu tools already, and you can use the ipkg framework to install more; then there's Preware, a still thriving open source community / app catalog tool full of free unsigned apps and OS patches which palm and hp both officially sanctioned. The main limitation was that some of the hardware wasn't that well documented.

sigh. My only hope now is that android one day becomes as easy to mod, so getting python and an ssh/http server on my next phone is just as simple.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

As it happens, my HP Touchpad failed a couple weeks ago, I think it might be the ridiculously fragile microUSB port. Talked to phone support and they sent me a new charger, which didn't work, and now I have to send them the tablet for repair.

If this was an iPad, I'd have made an appointment with the local genius bar, and have been handed a refurbished unit within 10 minutes.

Re:Price Point

[Raenex]

Tablets are horrendously overpriced. The samsung galaxy Tab 10.1 costs around $170 to manufacture.

It's pretty standard to have items retail for 2 times the wholesale cost. There's too much competition in the market to believe that tablets are overpriced by a large amount.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

False, and I would need only a little more evidence before calling you a damned shill.

Re:Price Point

[Xenx]

Their point doesn't become invalid just because you don't use the functionality. There are plenty of things that get used by plenty of other people, but I just don't care about personally... like video chat as a whole. That doesn't invalidate its use, by any means.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who has never examined Apple hardware quality beyond glancing at the CPU speed.

Re:Price Point

[MagusSlurpy]

You're right, just because I don't use it doesn't invalidate the functionality, but if no one uses it, it does. My original post asked how often anyone actually used the rear camera, because my assumption was that, like me, no one else would have anything more than the most occasional, trivial use for it. Apple could bundle a USB CD burner with it and list it as a "feature," and I'm sure some people would occasionally use it, but that doesn't really make it a better device.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

The camera sucks, but in pretty much every other way, hardware wise, it's beating an iPad 1, and nearly every other tablet out there. They are fantastic little boxes, really. I love mine, and one of the first things I did with it was get into creating apps. In one month, with one app out, I had covered the cost of my complete 2 touchpad setup, with cases, chargers, and bluetooth keyboards, and the revenue is going -up- from there, as more people receive their touchpads. And that's with a fairly vertically oriented app.

If all the people on Slashdot that are developers, who managed to get one of these fantastic devices, put one app out in the catalog, the platform would be in a ton better shape, and ya'all might make a little cash.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if a construction foreman finds it useful to be able to show his boss video of the job site while chatting, or a doctor finds it useful to video a rash on a patient's leg while chatting with a colleague, well, since YOU can't find such a use, it's obviously a worthless feature? Maybe you just have no imagination.

Re:Price Point

[MagusSlurpy]

Where does seeing the other person's reaction come into play? Again, just turn the tablet around to use the front camera - it's really not that hard.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

The camera sucks, but in pretty much every other way, hardware wise, it's beating an iPad 1

Yea because the iPad 1 is the most current version out there.

Re:Price Point

[Daengbo]

Apple sold over 11 million iPads last quarter, during which they made well over US$6B in profit. Apple has the best and cheapest supply chain in the business, which other manufacturers are trying to match. Apple isn't making 40% margin off of a product with parts cost of $326 while selling retail at $499. That leaves no room for any other part of the chain to make any money.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who whacks it while looking at his Apple hardware.

Re:Price Point

[CAIMLAS]

Don't be retarded. There are very, very few people who buy on "hardware price point" anymore. Usually, they're the geeks who wipe the machine and put their own (or pirated) software on it almost immediately who do that.

Everyone else looks at software. Applications, features, and capabilities. The Touchpads were quite capable for what they were (more so than the iPads I've seen, by far - so unless I'm not seeing all that's to offer in that department? - faster, more responsive, better UI, and a better browser). What they lacked (and lack) are the apps.

Android on the Touchpads, for instance, is pretty damn nice. Lighter? Sorry, I see that as a disadvantage in many regards. It's less sturdy.

I'm not saying the HP Touchpads were awesome, mind you. I'm just saying they didn't fly off the shelf due to the reasons you state. At $300, for instance, they'd have been a steal (or $350 with Android support - at $400, the Asus Transformer is a better deal).

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I got one of the $100 'pads, and frankly, that's about what it's worth.

Re:Price Point

[vaporland]

This is more functional and portable - no stylus required. Steve Jobs hated styluses...

Re:Price Point

[John Bresnahan]

Obligatory Dilbert Comic

Re:Price Point

[dgatwood]

If so, then this is a good example of why you need to test your products thoroughly before you ship them. Once your product is perceived to be slow, it's very hard to destroy that misperception, even if you fix whatever problem caused the slowness....

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who whacks it to photos of Steve Ballmer.

Filled my Cancelled Order

[vitriolum]

I had managed to get two orders for a 16gb model in on the Small/Medium Business site. One was before they said they were out of stock. The second one I placed after they had declared that stock was depleted. There was a link going around that let you add it to your cart even though the product page said "out of stock."

They sent an email not long after stating that my order would be cancelled due to being placed after they ran out. Then, a few weeks ago I got two emails saying my order would be shipped within two weeks, specifying two different order numbers.

Sure enough, this past week I got two 16gb Touchpads via Fedex. So, it wasn't just the employees that wiped out the supply, but all the past-posted orders as well.

Re:Filled my Cancelled Order

[Anonymous Coward]

This happened to me, too. I did't know about the link, I just used the store and, over several hours, made my way through the steps of ordering. I started Saturday evening, finished Monday, and was told later in emails I was too late. Two orders, three 16gb models, $99 plus tax each, they canceled the orders, resurrected them, then filled them. I thought these were going straight to Android or Ubuntu but, you know what? They are so superior to the iPad for what I need them for (they act as flash drives when plugged into USB, have Flash in the browser, what I consider a superior on-screen keyboard, nice build quality, interesting "card" metaphor) that I now have forgotten about turning them into something else and am finding them very fun to use in place of the iPad. I've already lost one - my computer-phobic mom fell in love with one and took it. She was turned off by the iPad because she couldn't find the apostrophe.

Re:Filled my Cancelled Order

[friedmud]

"She was turned off by the iPad because she couldn't find the apostrophe."

FFR: Just hold down comma for a moment....

Re:Filled my Cancelled Order

[bored_engineer]

I received my $99 unit from HP yesterday and love WebOS. I think that the browser could be faster, but beyond that, I'm a fan. It's got me thinking seriously about nabbing a used Pre on E-Bay to complement the 'pad. I was actually saving my pennies to buy the 16GB tablet at $500 when HP announced the $99 deal. I had already decided to buy it, but it was beyond my limit for a casual purchase.

When they announced that they would discontinue the TouchPad, I decided to buy anyway assuming that there would be an android version available for it right away. Now that I've used WebOS, I don't want to give it up. The card interface is brilliant beyond words. Throwing an app to get rid of it is like a science fiction dream.

I design roads for a living (CAD). (Hurray, I got a job after 1.5 years unemployed.) After using WebOS for a day, I can see a touchscreen computer with which I do my designs using a large touch-based screen (angled like a drafting table) and a specialized keyboard (or input area on the 'screen), then revert to keyboard and mouse for text/spreadsheet work. I've used iOS and android on both tablets and phones and not come away with the feeling of much greater possibilities. The latter two seem like limited tools only for consumption, while WebOS begins to feel like something that I can use throughout the day. (It's impossible to ignore that Apple's design heavily informs both WebOS and Android. I also have to recog)

It's too bad that HP doesn't still have engineers at the helm. A company needs MBA's, too, but it seems like any company that innovates and gets in front of the market is led by a designer/engineer. This CAD system I've (very) crudely outlined is as forward-thinking as other tools HP's developed in the past. Unfortunately, they've had MBAs at the helm for so long that I fear they can't see possibilities beyond next quarter's profit. The change is really quite dismaying and rather clearly show's HPs future.

Re:Filled my Cancelled Order

[recoiledsnake]

http://rootzwiki.com/topic/3477-releasealpha2discussion-cyanogenmod-team-touchpad-port/

Re:Filled my Cancelled Order

[AmigaBen]

Install preware, do the fixes to turn down logging and clock the processor up to it's native speed (thus, I hesitate to call it overclock) and stop whining about the browser. WebOS is very nice, but then Android on it is nice too. Personally, I'm excited to see ICS on it..

Why the fuss?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it because they said they're not making them anymore? Why all the fuss when most of them will be sitting around unused after 6 months. People rushed out and bought multiple ones? Really? For something that they wouldn't have bothered to purchase until they heard they stopped making them? These are the same people who go out and hoard toilet paper when snow showers are forecast, or bought up three crates of D-cell batteries when they heard a hurricane was coming, even though they live 500 mile inland.

Re:Why the fuss?

[Osgeld]

Yea I dont really understand it either, unless a few of them had families to give them out to, but this is slashdot the closest thing to a family most have around here is a porn site and a bag of cheetos... its technology, it aint going to get more expensive with time

Re:Why the fuss?

[Astronomerguy]

Welll....The OS is fucking superior to iOS - it really is quite nice. It needs more polish, but the multi-tasking is damned nice. The card interface is brilliant and is more intuitive than iOS (full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 as does my wife and I run OSX in virtualization on PC's on VMWare Workstation despite Apple's odd restrictions). Sure, there aren't 1000 fart apps for it (I found just 1) but as a content consumption and unified communications device it borders on excellent...and you get the ability to play Flash. Overclock the sucker (did I mention that HP embraces Home-brew?) and add some cool hacks and you have a bitchin' beast that as a bonus plays Angry Birds. I can read e-books, .pdfs, remotely connect to my PC and servers, edit MS Office docs... I have access to an iPad and Playbook at work, as do my colleagues, And I've played with both over several weeks. Meh. 9 out of 39 of us bought TouchPads for what it can do, and for the potential to run Android in a dual-boot config. That was my primary reason for jumping on the low-cost 32Gb Touch pad - running Android...until I started using WebOS and dove deep into modding the device. Too bad HP will let it die a painful death. WebOS, we hardly knew ye...

Re:Why the fuss?

[MagusSlurpy]

The fuss is because it's a hundred dollar tablet that isn't four years old, not because it's actually anything special.

Re:Why the fuss?

[JWSmythe]

    Well, I can say that I wasn't very fond of the WebOS interface at all.

    When I bought them, I hadn't researched the possibility of Android on them well enough. I mistook "It could be done", for "It has been done". Now that CyanogenMod has their alpha version available, I'm very happy. I installed alpha 2 last weekend on mine, and installed it on my girlfriends this evening. The first install session was kind of hit and miss, because I hadn't already done it. Once I got everything lined up, it was just a few minutes from turning it on to copy files, to her logging into Google so the marketplace would work.

    It is an Alpha release, so there are bugs. There are little things like, sometimes when it goes to sleep, it won't wake up. There are workarounds for right now. Also, the android marketplace isn't installed, so you have to get a copy of the signed marketplace so it will work right.

    They are still polishing up the finer points, but all in all, it's a very usable version. Oh, and so much faster and smoother than WebOS.

Re:Why the fuss?

[spire3661]

Actually, WebOS is something special, it was just too little, too late.

good buy at twice the price

[dcherryholmes]

I tried like hell to get in on the firesale. It didn't bother me that I didn't manage to get one, but the several rounds of "you're in, we've charged your card, your ship date is X... oops, psyche, no TP for you" pissed me right the hell off. Nonetheless, as a palm pre owner and a bit of a fanboy, I really wanted one. I finally caved and grabbed one off craigslist, unopened, for $200. For the hardware and compared to what else you can get out there, $200 is still a steal.

So now I have one, and of course I've got it dual-booting with CM7, but you know what? I still leave it in webOS most of the time. Aside from the glaring lack of an sftp client app for webOS, it does everything I want it to do. And it's slicker, more elegant, just hands-down nicer to use than either iOS or android (Ice Cream might make me re-evaluate, but as things stand). WebOS was the BeOS of our time, and I just hope it will live for at least a few more cycles on the hardware. Two hundred bucks *easily* well spent.

Re:good buy at twice the price

[Joe U]

Similar situation here, I ordered from about 8 places, one of them finally came through, not at $99, but still a darn good deal.

WebOS is a good OS. I wish there were a few more apps, but I'm doing ok and the remote desktop client is a quick fix for when I have to do something too complex for the Touchpad.

Re:good buy at twice the price

[dcherryholmes]

I've fluttered through various rounds of webOSdoctor and don't have it installed at the moment, but carving out an ext3 slice and installing lxde ubuntu on it also plugs a few holes. They use quite a few nice hacks to make it touch-screen friendly, but it's still not quite as nice as the native webOS. I was using it mainly for gFTP before the CM7 alpha came out.

Re:good buy at twice the price

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say, after using WebOS for 2 months or so before finally being able to dual boot CM7, and as someone who owns an SGS2, WebOS is MUCH more user-friendly than Android. I still use WebOS on my Touchpad unless there's something it can't do (for instance, I haven't been able to get into outlook based mail accounts with it.)

I'm hoping ICS will fix that issue, but still, I think if more people would have invested in WebOS it would have been a serious contender.

Re:good buy at twice the price

[shmeeps]

Damn, wasn't logged in. Herpa-Derpa

Wise Choice Meg .. No Brainer

[Anonymous Coward]

For the next decade, Apple iPad aka "touch pad" may be like the Apple Newton of this decade.

That Apple, Inc., not Apple Computer, would release and promote wildly their iPad and its descendents ... may be straigic ... a Trojen Horse for the PC marketeers like HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo et al. ,,, in order to deprive them ... and that they spend wildly ... their resources ... trying to copy a ... shadow product.

And why not?

Drive the competion into dust. Then sweep up the remains of the day and rule the world in the nuclear aftermath. One ring to rule them all.

Beutiful plan.

I ditching mine.

[B33RM17]

I managed to get one from the university bookstore I work at in the first round of the firesale. But then an alum donated a bunch of Xooms for us EECS students... So mine is up for sale. Any takers???

Re:I ditching mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested. If you're selling for a reasonable price, contact me at girolamous at yahoo dot com. Thanks.

Re:I ditching mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

$99 ? sure ill take it. email me. beware at gmail.com

Was this a complete scam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they fill any orders at all? On a tech site a friend runs, more than four dozen people said they had ordered, but HP didn't fulfill a single order. I know I don't know anyone personally received one. Was this simply another dishonest publicity stunt from HP?

I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[macraig]

Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[vmartell]

Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.

Got it too... Announcement is legit.... Sorry.... V

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[Anonymous Coward]

I received this e-mail...

From: Hewlett-Packard@email.americas.hp.com

Dear Valued Customer, Making sure customers have a positive experience when they purchase our products is a priority for us. In some cases, limited inventory makes it challenging to fulfill all customer orders...

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[AtomicAdam]

Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.

I wonder because I had two emails registered to receive the update my work one and my personal email. I got it on my work email but not my personal. I know I know "pics or it didn't happen" The funny thing was I just put up the blog like a week ago to document the building of my rep-rap. I wanted to submit the email but I couldn't because it wasn't on any sites yet. I figured my blog would have to do. Yeah,.. sucks to be the blogger of unknown repute as you can imagine.

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[Garybaldy]

Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.

I received one as well. Shame that HP showed no care for those that have used webOS since the week it came out. Three years ago. Glad i ended up getting a TP other ways.

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[David_Hart]

Yes. I received the out of stock message late last night. So the message is confirmed.

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[macraig]

Here it is Saturday morning and still no copy of it for me. No matter... it's still bad news no matter what form the messenger takes.

Re:I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire?

[Anonymous Coward]

I received it yesterday, 28-Oct. The time on the message was 14:56 PDT.

ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[Anonymous Coward]

You puckin' sheep. When will any of you learn that corporations lie to increase sales?

There is no shortage. They don't even need to post or publish any actual sales results. All they need to do is let a handfull of sheeple buy these HP Touchpads in order to get the rumors moving around that they are out of them, allthewhile studying the price-point of what they can sell them for.

They manufacture this like how Steve Jobs pays Chinese workers verry low wages to get this product on the shelves: HP Touchpads could be manufactured for under $50 material and labor combines, and sold at phenomenal profit, because that's what corporations do.

Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, because not selling anything for a long time and then doing a limited run at a very low profit margin is a great way to sell stuff.

And the cost of parts was not $50. Stop pulling numbers out of your arse.

Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[SuricouRaven]

No, but not making enough on the first production run, deliberatly running out and then ramping up production *is* a good way. It builds hype. People are natural followers - if they see a product is so hugely popular it's out of stock, they want it all the more. Then it's just a matter of working out the optimal time to feed this pent-up demand. Wait too long, and they'll go to your competitor.

Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[Genda]

I'm sorry, but this is just a plain ol' fashioned cluster fsck.

Buy WebOS from Palm. Get it to a point where its actually cool beans. Release a product that first users proclaim may in fact be an iPad killer. Kill the product and dump it nearly at cost. Discover that people are really interested in the product, and promises them you'll keep them in touch and that there will probably be enough to sell another round (first hinting that there may be as many as a million, and ultimately that there'll at least be 200,000.) Then after waiting months, being told "Tough noogies!", we sold them all to BEST BUY and other distributors. So you're not going to see these beauties without our strategic partner clipping you for fistful of Benjamins.

So Meg, I get it, HPs little serial brain fart left its partners out in the cold, holding their manly bits and looking really stupid. Embarrassing really. So your fist act as Honcho du Jour, was to get down on your knees and give them a big warm smooch. Make their owwy all better. The thing is, you did it on the backs of your customers. The people who actually thought something of HPs products and their commitment to customer satisfaction. So what we have now to show for our interest and patient waiting is an electronic nasty-gram of your middle finger, telling us once more that HP doesn't give a flying fsck at a rolling doughnut for it's customers. You know, a business does this enough, and after a little while, surprise, it doesn't have any customers.

So I say screw the Touchpad, You've "Lucyed" me one time too many, I don't wanna play football with you anymore. Meg has already indicated that she's killing WebOS, the Touchpad is a dead end, a lost cause, and Touchpad owners and users can go straight to heel, because the entire product line has no future. This has all been a exercise in brain damage and a company that has so lost its way that it's found new and creative ways to piss off its supply chain, its retailers, its customers and its strategic partners. Meg, sweetheart, I understand your hands are full and honestly I see how you got yourself wedged, So I'll cut you some slack, but if this is any hint of HPs future, I don't see a rosy outcome for you or HP.

Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[Daengbo]

HP, AMD, and Nokia all seem to be suffering from the same illness. High CEO turnover with each CEO looking to make ends meet. If Ballmer gets fired, I'll expect MS to catch it and be in the tank in ten years. Not that I like Ballmer or that I think he's doing a good job. At least he's a long-term CEO that is keeping the giant profitable.

Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap.

[walterbyrd]

One difference: if Ballmer is fired, he will be replaced by another long-time MS executive. IBM does the same sort of thing.

HP is different. HP hires outsiders from completely different sorts of businesses.

Out of touch completely

[kawabago]

Their new business plan is to go back to what worked in the past, too bad times have changed.

Re:Out of touch completely

[Anonymous Coward]

They're flopping around badly. Hurts to see.

Re:Out of touch completely

[facetiousprogrammer]

No worry - they'll be back with TouchPads business with next CEO shortly....

I got mine...

[David_Hart]

I placed two orders. The first was using the cart trick when HP was saying that they were out of stock and was for 3 touchpads. The second was the next day just after HP had updated their SMB site to say that they were out of 16GB models but still had 32GB models and it was also for 3 touchpads.

The reason for the second order was just in case the first order was cancelled. At least with the second order I could argue that HP was advertising stock at the time I placed the order. I ended up getting all 6. All of them are spoken for as gifts for friends and family.

Personally, after using WebOS for the last 3 weeks, I prefer it over Apple's iOS. I have an iPad 2 from work which I have been using for the last 3 months. Of course, the big difference is the lack of apps for WebOS. If HP had followed their PC model and sold the Touchpad for just over cost, they would have had a good chance of competing with Apple. But HP doesn't seem to be able to get out of their own way these days.

Now I await the cyanogenmod version of Ice Cream Sandwich so that I can load my favorite apps. Until then, I will be using the Touchpad for email, web, and social media, which is 80% of my online activity from my couch.

corrected title

[Anonymous Coward]

"We are out of TouchPads until our new master decides that it is time to change our minds"

Their new master is Microsoft.

Sorta makes sense really.

Microsoft commands. Then their tame proxies (HP/Nokia/whoever) bends over and does exactly as their lord and master commands.
SOP for the guys from Redmond.

Subject should read "HP Officially Out of Touch"

[Kagato]

There, fixed it for you.

Wait List

[buzlink]

I thought the point of being on the wait list was to be notified of when more were going to be made available after the Fire Sale? What happened to this?

webOS was OK, but Android wins with its apps

[rklrkl]

I got my UK TouchPad in the firesale (116 pounds for 32GB model - yes, rip-off Britain strikes again) and whilst webOS is OK, it's not as stunning as people make out. The card model isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread - your "flick to minimise" has to be precisely co-ordinated otherwise you end up having to use the bezel button instead (the number of times I've just scrolled instead of minimising is annoying). The lack of a close button on the windows mean two actions instead of one (flick+flick or bezel button+flick) to get finally close an app.

However, it's the lack of apps that's the real killer of WebOS - whilst software written for the various Pre mobile phone models had slowly increased, the ones that are TouchPad compatible (i.e. didn't run in a small Pre phone emulator) were building up even more slowly. So much so, there was an embarrassing trumpeting by HP recently that they'd hit 1,000 apps for the TouchPad, a mark that I suspect Android and iPad tablets exceeded within a week of their release (and that was a couple of years ago too!).

For example, I can't find a decent free fullscreen webOS chess or Sudoku for the TouchPad (they are either for the Palm Pre phone or cost money), whereas there are dozens of each on Android. It's why I'm now mostly using CyanogenMod 7 on my TouchPad - there's loads of apps on my Android TouchPad now don't have webOS equivalents (even with Preware installed, which I do have).

new Best Buy promo

[Anonymous Coward]

However, you can get a 32Gig at Best Buy during November, for $149, with the purchase of any HP Laptop, Desktop, or AIO unit.

Re:new Best Buy promo

[Anonymous Coward]

Pathetic marketing! As if a tablet with no future is going to encourage buyers of their other inferior bloatware!

So why did HP buy Palm again?

[foniksonik]

This whole scenario seems incredible. HP buys Palm, assets, people, hardware - then drops the hardware to build their own. Fine they are a hardware company- makes sense. Then they say they are going to roll out WebOS everywhere to interconnect printers, phone, tablets, PCs, etc. Then the announce WebOS is dead (except as an embedded OS), then announce they are getting out of the PC business altogether. The whole damn thing is madness.