Hewlett-Packard is selling off their remaining stock of 16gb TouchPads for $99 on their website and through various retailers in the US and Canada. While I haven’t see the reduction yet on the 32gb model that price is supposed to drop to $150 in the near future. BestBuy has announced that they are allowing customers that previously purchased a TouchPad up to 60 days (up from their normal 14 days) to return the device for a full refund. Office Depot is also reporting they will take returns on the device.
At $99 this is a great buy and even with the product being discontinued a very good value.
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Many places are sold out of the TouchPads as of today, but something is telling me that if you check back on the HP site this coming week they will be available there.
We went to Staples this AM with every intention of picking one up. They had them on display. After playing with one for about 10 minutes, we decided to pass and save the $100.
Compared to the iPad, the response time for the browser was just too slow. Can’t imagine having to put up with the speed every time we use it.
While some would say that at $100, the tablet is a great value…and we would agree if it is just for checking email. But for web surfing and watching movies…it would just not be an enjoyable experience, especially once the thrill of the initial low price has been forgotten.
@RainyDayInterns,
There is a system update to the TouchPad which would download after you got the device setup. I would bet many retail stores don’t get that done. webOS 3.02 fixes many problems. As for web speed. I don’t notice any difference between the TouchPad, iPad 1 or an Android device running 3.2. Overall, I like the TouchPad’s browser mostly because it incorporates Flash.
As for watching movies, the TouchPad is absolutely fine for watching a movie that has been loaded on the device or purchased from their movie store. As for streaming, they don’t have a netflix app for it, and at this point I doubt they will. I will try Amazon’s service when I get a chance.
Now, all that being said…even at $100 the TouchPad might not be for everyone. I would not suggest it as a replacement for the iPad if you’re into gaming…or you want to get the latest app dedicated to a TV show. It also doesn’t have a good document editing app.
@ Ken…
Interesting info and you are likely right that the unit we sampled probably did not have the update. It was quite surprising that the unit felt underpowered as the processor should have been quite adequate for the task. There HAS to be quite a bit more speed which could be squeezed out of the unit.
You make a good point regarding loaded movies vs streaming. We almost never load a movie on the iPad (Hulu, Netflix only) as we found that most movie watching on the iPad was impulse-based for us.
As a longtime Palm booster, I was thrilled to hear about WebOS until I tried the Pre in a phone store. It was slow and I never understood why the card motif got such rave reviews. Multitasking was not something I desperately needed on a mobile device. If they had stuck with Palm’s original layout (which Apple copied so successfully), they could have brought back the Palm faithful. In fact, I found the biggest loss to be the Palm Desktop, the best calender program I’ve ever used.
Indeed. The TouchPad is a tad underclocked, as the previously announced 4G version used the sane chipset and CPU bumped up to a higher clock speed.
3.0.2 was the fix that HP announced that would come at the end of may to add clock and calculator apps long with a less-sensitive rotation switch… and it did so.
But after they saif they were in this for the long haul, and ditching the TouchPad and maybe WebOS like this (what will they run it on, having ditched the Palm products and planning to seriously cut their consumer products, with the servers running different OSes), I’d be leery of their future products and the support, especially as a business, since their word’s no good.
At least IBM had an orderly, announced, and controlled sell-off of their consumer division to Lenovo.
I bought my TP two weeks ago and after the OTA and adding some patches from the Homebrew community the thing flys! And at this price it well worth the investment. I’m taking mine back to Office Depot and seeing if they will refund the price I paid for what they are selling it now for then buying one for my wife with the difference. Many might not think this is a good idea but I know from experience it is a great deal.
Dang now I want one!!!
Where can I get one?
Everywhere I check their sold out 🙁
@Bob DeLoyd – Keep watching the HP website. A large bird told me they may be getting a great number of them in from their warehouse later in the week. Whether they sell them directly or give them to retail partners is up in the air. Since there is no discounting going on with the accessories retail is discovering they can make money selling the TouchPad.
@ken S thanks. I already have the HP TouchPad page on a tab that I keep reloading because it says “Out of stock Please check back soon”. So your words of inspiration will keep me reloading for the next week 😛
Gosh if you hear of anything or anywhere else this can be bought be sure to post it here for your wonderful readers 🙂