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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.'"
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?
No, it's irrefutable proof that the tablets out there so far aren't worth $500.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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...
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.