I gotta admit, I was pretty fired up when I first heard TouchPad tablets were dropping to $100. In fact, I was second person into a local Best Buy yesterday with intentions of picking a unit up. Unfortunately, the sales clerk quipped that they aren’t Best Buy Canada and wouldn’t be offering discounted hardware. I was left with the impression that units were headed back to HP, who’ve essentially buried this product and webOS. Yet, given demand and perhaps by working a deal with HP, Best Buy has changed course and will be offering HP’s discounted pricing. Although… they will not be accepting returns on the steeply discontinued TouchPad hardware and inventory is limited.
A $300 – $400 discount on a modern tablet is a heck of a deal. Even one that’s not an iPad and doesn’t provide the most responsive experience. I figured $100 for purely a 10″ capacitive web browsing device would be a great accessory to have around, picking up slack when our iPad is in use. As you can’t really count on continued app development at this point. Related, the inability of the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader to support webOS is a major factor in why I may pass on a purchase today. And apply that saved cash to Amazon’s upcoming tablet. At least until I see some sort of sign that we can run Android on the TouchPad.
Are you in? If so, you can probably avoid the brick & mortar shopping frenzy today and wait until HP.com resumes sales (once the servers are back up). I’m quite certain they’ll continue to clear inventory as efficiently as possible to put this multi-billion dollar debacle behind them.
Postscript: I also swung by Staples late Saturday, who was offering discounted TouchPad pricing, but the place had been picked clean. Not a single sign that the TouchPad had even existed.
