TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99

http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/FB355UA%2523ABA?jumpid=se_r1002_fp_usen_hho

by cygwin98 • 15 years ago

67 79 15 years ago

shopping.hp.com

donnaware2• 15 years ago

The obvious question is: how difficult is it to load Android on it?

ajays2• 15 years ago

Yes, I'd love to get my hands on it and put Android on it.

joelackner• 15 years ago

hopefully not very hard: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1224540

KenCochrane• 15 years ago

All sold out!

sp332• 15 years ago

Everywhere that actually cut prices is now sold out. http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3220862#edit41...

sciurus• 15 years ago

Dang. Is there anyplace tracking these sales where I could sign up for an email alert?

CrazedGeek• 15 years ago

It may not update fast enough, but http://wantsthis.com will email you when an item in your list goes on sale on that site. You could just add all the sites you'd buy from that still have it at the normal price. (Although I've only tried it on Amazon, fwiw)

reemrevnivek• 15 years ago

I've been refreshing the Amazon page throughout the day. They just went up in price by $15; the official Amazon listing is gone and has been replaced by the listings from other merchants.

g0atbutt• 15 years ago

That link is sold out but I was able to purchase one from OfficeMax (online) at the discounted price.

lean• 15 years ago

Sold out :( (45mins after your comment)

noahc• 15 years ago

I just got one from office max offline. In fact I am using it to type this comment.

jrydberg• 15 years ago

Can I order these and ship internationally ? I guess OfficeMax does not ship over seas.

Nick_C• 15 years ago

There are US-based shippers that redirect your delivery to international. http://www.hopshopgo.com is one that my brother-in-law uses without problems to ship to Australia.

codeslush3• 15 years ago

goes to prove they had a desirable product, wrong price point!

eli• 15 years ago

Err, yeah, but it's priced below cost

codeslush3• 15 years ago

Sure, down vote at will! My point wasn't that the current price was the right price, but that it was overpriced before. Clearly, there is a demand for the product. Maybe an experiment with a happy medium would have been a good experiment before tossing out the entire product.

amurmann• 15 years ago

Video game consoles are always sold below production costs and money is made on game sales. Maybe that could have been a viable model for the touch pad. Sell the pad for cheap and make the money with app purchases

baddox• 15 years ago

Are you sure of that? Even if that's the case, it still goes to show you that there is a huge market for a tablet at that price point, and that HP's previous price point was a deal breaker for the vast majority of people. Maybe it's not yet economically feasible to manufacture a decent tablet of appreciable quality at 100 USD.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

In Monday's news, after selling out all TouchPads for $99, HP has announced that they've changed their minds and will keep producing webOS devices after all. :)

j_col• 15 years ago

Well, they have now created a potentially viable user base by putting hundreds of thousands of webOS devices in people's hands, who would have otherwise ignored platform. My feeling on this is that their gamble might lead to something interesting happening, worth keeping an eye on.

bhamnav• 15 years ago

argh :( looked nice. an absolute bargain.

dotcoma2• 15 years ago

see - you CAN compete with the iPad: it's all a matter of price ;-)

Apple-Guy• 15 years ago

HP's margin is lower than 30% on $500 MSRP. That means it costs HP at least $350 to produce each TouchPad (before the cost of buying Palm). Selling at $99 means at least a $200 lost on each item. Not sustainable.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

How is HP's shopping site so incredibly bad? How many different servers can we force the users' browsers to hit to load the cart. Loving the error msg:

>cpqUtil error '800a0006'

Overflow

/dstore/dcart/include/u_util.asp, line 221

jscheel2• 15 years ago

Wow, even the walmart where I live, and I live in podunk, sold out at 9am

lee_a• 15 years ago

While I'm sure many of them actually are sold out (and yours might be by now), if anyone else lives near a Wal-Mart make sure to not just call but go by the store and look around.

At mine, they had moved them from their original place to another display on the other side of department, and as I walked up behind a couple of employees I overheard one telling the other that they'd been telling everyone who called or asked that they were sold out (in an attempt to ensure there were a few left to buy at the end of the day I assume). They had a stack left.

barefoot• 15 years ago

Nice try, Wal-Mart marketing department.

jscheel2• 15 years ago

Had to go to pick up some other stuff and I didn't see any there, but that's a good point. I kind see why people do that, but it's still sleazy (and probably against their employee rules).

cletus• 15 years ago

What I find interesting are the anecdotes (of which I've now seen several) of first-time tablet owners buying TouchPads because they're so cheap.

One has to wonder if HP hasn't inadvertently created a whole new group of future iPad owners.

hackoder• 15 years ago

Can you share some of these? Should be interesting reading.

I'm mostly seeing nerds going crazy at the cheap hackable tablet.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

Check out the various threads on slickdeals.net. There are literally over a thousand pages (split among multiple threads) of people scrambling to buy these at the discounted prices. Very few of the people there are geeks, mostly just normal folks trying to jump in on what is seen as a huge value (~75% price drop over a single day).

Seeing those forums will also show you why you will never be able to buy one of these online at the new price unless you are extremely lucky. The item is selling out in seconds every time the price drop is noticed at a new retailer, and these people are tracking all of them.

I tried to jump in on this last night and put an order in for the 16gb at Microcenter's online site less than a minute after the new pricing went live there. The order made it through their website and I even got a confirmation email and a precharge ding on my credit card, went to bed thinking I'd be playing with WebOS on a tablet sometime next week but woke up to an email saying my order was cancelled due to insufficent stock.

melvinng• 15 years ago

I guess this is also quite a good marketing plan. Now with over 250,000 tablets in the market, it ruins the ipad market + creates a nice pool of app developers.

earl• 15 years ago

Not really.

The ipad sold (as near as I can find) nearly 14.8M first gen and another 10M+ second gen [1]. Thus the ipad market is roughly 100x bigger, which that multiple growing every day. I can't see why you'd possibly choose to develop an app for a market that starts off 100x as small, doesn't have neighboring markets like iphones/ipod touches which use the same api and tooling, and for which the main developer has just bailed.

[1] http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...

angryasian• 15 years ago

as a first gen ipad owner, I think it will have the opposite effect. I had the ipad sitting on my dining table for over a year now, collecting dust as I'd rather use my kindle for reading, my laptop for computer stuff or phone when on the go. I know a lot of people will disagree, but I know for a lot of people once the whole new toy effect wears off.. it becomes an expensive toy. For the people like me it will be hard to justify paying $500 for a tablet again.

I think its actually quite brilliant strategy as HP is still in the business of selling computers, flood the market with good, cheap tablets and reduce the magical experience to a commodity and hope it works. Asus had the same sort of lead with netbooks, and once the market got flooded they became commodity.

jimbobimbo• 15 years ago

Well, not really. I have a bunch of reasons to not to buy iPad or Android tablet, but I had only one reason to buy this one: at $99 I don't really care if I have any use for this tablet or not.

eftpotrm• 15 years ago

Meanwhile, HP UK have them at £349/429 for 16/32GB. Pity, for anywhere near $99 it'd make sense for me.

ugh• 15 years ago

So, is that only happening online or also in the real world? Also, is it worldwide? I just happened to be at a (German) electronics retailer and they still sell the pads for their old prices and the people there know nothing about a reduction in price.

(They are also still selling the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, preliminary injunction be damned :)

– Edit: Also, I played around with it a bit. It certainly wasn’t as bad as some made it sound. The tablet was not connected to the internet (none where, which makes testing all that harder) but no matter what I tried, everything was very snappy – to a degree that the Honeycomb tablets weren’t really. (I have unreasonably high standards.) The only thing that tended to take some time was launching apps.

cdr2• 15 years ago

This morning in the US, there were people lining up outside of retailers before they opened. It was a mini-Black Friday.

AFAIK, the price drop happened for Canada on the 19th and in the US on the 20th. Some retailers are accepting the price drop and some are just shipping the units back to HP. Unknown when/if it'll happen in other countries.

dotcoma2• 15 years ago

so, the price is back to $499? :) http://i.imgur.com/SnLjT.png

sjs382• 15 years ago

I got a 32GB one (and a ream of paper) for $133 last night. I'm pretty much going to be using it as an instapaper client, so it will be great. :)

ajays2• 15 years ago

Wow. The OfficeMax site, http://www.officemax.com/ actually will just return an empty page when you search for "HP Touchpad" or "Touchpad". Note that searching for something that doesn't exist in their inventory returns a _different_ page. It's as if they're actively blocking searches for "HP Touchpad" and "Touchpad".

rick888• 15 years ago

I went to my local Office max today to see if they had any left. They were sold out.

The guy also told me they have only ever had 1 in stock.

83457• 15 years ago

BestBuy is no longer selling them and if you click on a link for HP Touchpad from the back to school page it shows an error message.

tertius2• 15 years ago

They started selling them again about 4 hours ago.

http://forums.bestbuy.com/t5/Best-Buy-Geek-Squad-Policies/HP...

brentvatne• 15 years ago

Canadians over at RedFlagDeals.ca have been in touch with HP customer service and been assured that although the price on hp.ca isn't adjusted yet, refunds will be given for the difference in price sometime over the next couple of days. If this does not happen automatically, you can supposedly call on Monday and they will do it manually.

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/merged-hp-touchpad-16gb-99-99...

bnycum• 15 years ago

Bought a 32GB one at Sam's Club this morning. I watched the last one any Walmart had in town sell right in front of me. Went on a wind goose chase but got one. Its an awesome device. Been rock solid, feels great. My only gripe is lack of apps. There is one vnc app out there but has bad reviews from touchpad owners.

watty• 15 years ago

Found out about this a little late and it's sold out EVERYWHERE. Would have loved a tablet for $99!

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

At $99 it would make for a pretty good digital picture frame. You would just need to remember to reboot it every couple of days.

vbone• 15 years ago

Why would you need to reboot?

donnaware2• 15 years ago

perhaps the furvor over this reveals something about the tablet price point? hmmmm. could this spark a tablet price war?

skywalker7861• 15 years ago

see HP dint price it right..who said it was HW or SW?

cpenner461• 15 years ago

It took a while to get through, but I was able finally able to order one through the HP Small & Medium Business Store (http://www.hp.com/sbso/). Had to pay for shipping though.

freshrap62• 15 years ago

Just tried on the site. It lets you add it to the cart, then it seems like it crashes. Did you go through this as well?

colson042• 15 years ago

It's been doing that for hours.

ttrashh• 15 years ago

Just keep trying. Took me about 30 minutes of refreshing and error messages at every step to get one.

desigooner• 15 years ago

If anybody is still looking to order, try ordering from the HP Small Business site using Opera as your browser. You might have to hit refresh at every step (since the website is unstable right now and errors out) but my order went through. In fact, I did it twice so I have 2 orders in the system. The confirmation page said that a customer service agent will be contacting me to confirm the order.

mikezupan• 15 years ago

I was just able to pick up a 32gig model from the small business site.. thanks!

gsivil• 15 years ago

99$ dollars seems a fair(good) price for a second-rate product. I would not be paying more than 200 $ for any tablet in the market.

colson042• 15 years ago

I just went into the Wal Mart here in my town and they have two in 32GB in the case, but would not match the price. The squeaky little overnight manager argued with me about it.

How are you guys getting the online deal price matched in the store?

bond• 15 years ago

Maybe turning the TouchPad into an Android tablet would be a good idea...

http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?t=3327&p=67699

tertius2• 15 years ago

Best Buy is selling it again.

http://forums.bestbuy.com/t5/Best-Buy-Geek-Squad-Policies/HP...

lukifer• 15 years ago

I managed to pick up one of these at Walmart. There are some areas where it's rough around the edges, but overall I love the UI every bit as much as I thought I would. The hardware is actually pretty decent, heavier than the iPad, but still comfortable. I can already tell, though, that the screen will not be near as scratch-proof as the iPad's.

The loss of webOS is a damn shame. Best case scenario, it becomes the Amiga of the tablet world, with die-hard fans keeping it clinging to life with hacks and homebrews.

petervandijck• 15 years ago

http://twitter.com/#!/petervandijck/status/10427215786502144...

MrFacepalm• 15 years ago

Holy...! I was ordering 2 32GB ones from HP and because of the errors, it processed it as 4 tablets (because of refresh I guess) and there's NO REFUND for them :( Fortunately, it says Customer rep will call me to confirm, can I change it then? If they won't, I'm willing to sell it at $149 (+ $10 tax fee) price, if anyone missed it and is interested.

TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99

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