Help! Help! Does anyone in the world know where to get one for these prices (for my personal use - don’t even have a laptop!!!)
Wouldn’t you rather buy an iPad for $50?
Whoops, my bad - I had no idea this was actually for real. I thought you were yanking our chain. Sorry for the snark!
Note that HP is dropping the TouchPad product lineup, in case that affects your decision process. On the other hand, perhaps that will make the product cheaper.
Cheaper than $99 (down from $399)?
… Did y’all just get convinced to do a spammer’s work for them?
Whoever set this price point and organized this firesale were idots. Who drops a price from $400-500 to $99? HP’s checkout servers crashed, participating venders servers crashed.
From other discussion boards, it sounds like many of the people who actually were able to get an order through ordered multiple units (like 10) so that they could turn around and sell them for a profit. This lead to HP and venders selling out of the tablets before they could even get the servers working properly.
On HP’s website,you can sign up for an email notification once HP gets some more, they are temporarily out of stock. If they keep the same price, suspect the same thing. They will send out an email that says they have some more, and then it will sell out in minutes.
My understanding is that they are already sold out. There may be a few bricks and mortar retailers that still have them, but that’s it.
Retail stores that didn’t participate in the fire sale (I think only Best Buy and Office Depot were the big ones who did) are sending their stock back to HP for refunds. HP will then sell it via their website at the 99/149 prices. You can sign up on their website to be notified when they get stuff in.
So I’d except dribs and drabs of availability via the HP site over the next week or two with supplies being rapidly eaten up as soon as they come in. Good luck!
Waited for an hour outside Best Buy yesterday morning for the doors to open, but I’m not complaining 
Isn’t HP abandoning this market? So that WebOS and tablet are going to get no more future support?
Supposedly, HP is just getting out of the hardware end and plans to develop and support WebOS with the hopes that it can license it to other platforms. It paid good money for it when it bought Palm they don’t want to just kill it.
But, even if they do, there’s a few other possibilities:
(1) Third party developers continue to release applications. What wasn’t “worth it” when only 40,000 units had been sold could suddenly see a viable market when 500,000+ discounted Touchpads are in people’s hands. There’s also the homebrew app community with Preware. If you don’t mind tinkering slightly, it’s pretty easy to turn off the internal logging programs and speed it up a fair amount. I’ve read that you can overclock the processor from 1.3GHz to 1.7GHz pretty easily as well with minimal negative battery effects (but don’t know if I’ll bother).
(2) People are already at work trying to port Android to the Touchpad. So you could wind up with a $99 Android pad instead.
(3) Worst case: You paid $99 or $149 for something that browses the web (with Flash), YouTube/Hulu, e-mail, stores/plays movies and music, plays Angry Birds and tower defense games, acts as a GPS, runs Kindle, does Skype, etc… Isn’t this what most people do with their tablets? Even if becomes rapidly “obsolete” in terms of support, will it do much less than people usually do anyway? At $99 or $149, that could be worth it. Heck, use it as a movie/game/storybook device for the kids on long car rides.