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.

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

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

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.

I purchased one at 12:40 PM PST today from Amazon, at full retail price. Four hours later, they promised me to issue a refund so the price was the $99 HP price.

It wasn't incredibly difficult to get one, if you really wanted to.

I just bought 2 this morning from HP Small Business store. Pessimism sucks.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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. :)

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.

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".

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.

They started selling them again about 4 hours ago.

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

but they will not let you pickup on stores (not even with the usual 3-5 ship-to-store). you have to pay a minimum of $10 shipping on them

*edit: link for free shipping: http://slickdeals.net/?&u2=http://www.bestbuy.com/site/M...

(keeping the slickdeal redirect they had since they are the source anyway)

it's still $114.74 in california after tax and 'recycling fee' --first time i've seen the last one.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sold out :( (45mins after your comment)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

Why would you need to reboot?

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

Err, yeah, but it's priced below cost

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.

Yeah, but your assumption is that HP, the company that has made thousands of products since 1939 doesn't know how to price things. Or that they know and chose to price the Touchpad for a extremely high profit margin. We know how much the parts cost[1], and that's but 1 small part of the overall cost to produce the tablet. Chances are that the Touchpad was priced correctly, and that anything they could have cut and remain profitable wouldn't have been enough to make a difference at retail.

[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/07/hp-touchpad-parts-analyze...

I want to believe you - it seems logical. But everything in front of me suggests they do not know how to price things! If you disagree with me, that's okay. But I have to believe they could have sold every single unit today for $200 to $250 per unit. Instead, this "company that has made thousands of products since 1939" dumped them all for $99 to $149. I don't know how many units were purchased today, but I can assume it was in the 100's of thousands - it was EVERYTHING that was available and I couldn't get my hands on one quickly enough. Clearly, they could have sold them for a higher price - how high? I don't know. But my strategy would have been to discount by 30%, then 40%, then 50% until everything was gone. I must be missing something. Too simple!

That's a different discussion. You're talking about how they should have dumped their inventory, the grandparent was talking about how they should have priced the product from the start.

My take is that they set the price so low as to clear inventory quickly. I'm sure the deals they had with retailers made a prolonged sell-off at incrementally decreasing prices undesirable.

actually, I think the price $99 is quite fair. Compared to having all the tablets returned and don't know what to do with them, HP now created a super hot products with 2-digit price that everyone wants to grab one, or two, or twelve. Things wouldn't happen this way if the price was $200. True that HP didn't earn that much money back but as a big corporation, HP could afford that and earned something beyond money. Let's keep an eye on this matter to see what happens in the end.

Or that if they wanted to make inroads in the market, they were going to have to make the first one as a loss leader to make inroads on the market.

And if anyone is going to make inroads against the iPad, that's likely what they will have to do. Nobody is going to get the economy of scale that the iPad does with their first product, and nobody is going to have superior features at a similar price point, so the only way to make inroads is going to be the loss leader and making money off of a similar app store. (the playstation model)

How much loss can any company take? The more successful your loss leader, the higher the losses. If you sell 10 million tablets at $100 loss per tablet that's a billion dollar loss. And I'm not sure selling 10 million would even be enough of an inroad. And I'm not sure that selling them at $100 per tablet loss would make them cheap enough to sell at that quantity. It's a very delicate situation.

> And I'm not sure selling 10 million would even be enough of an inroad.

Elsewhere in this thread, earl claims that around 25 million iPads (both generations) have been sold. So selling 10 million tablets would be a pretty huge inroad.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Yea, I finally got through it. Took me about 30 minutes though.

Thanks a ton for the encouragement to keep trying. Got through!

It's been doing that for hours.

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

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.

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).

Nice try, Wal-Mart marketing department.

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

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

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. :)

All sold out!

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

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.

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

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)

Amazon is only showing the price after the item is in your cart:

http://www.amazon.com/HP-TouchPad-9-7-Inch-Tablet-Computer/d...

Does that not circumvention services like that?

The price that is shown after it's in the cart is $493.99, hmm. And says "only 1 left in stock".

According to information given to people on deal sites that asked Amazon associates, Amazon will not be doing the price drop - they're returning all stock to HP.

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

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

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.

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?

Best Buy is selling it again.

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

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

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

argh :( looked nice. an absolute bargain.

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

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

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

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

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

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.