HP Officially Out of TouchPads 127
First time accepted submitter AtomicAdam writes
"I guess all that waiting and hoping was in vain. HP just sent out an email officially claiming to be out of TouchPads. 'Dear Valued Customer: Making sure customers have a positive experience when they purchase our products is a priority for us. In some cases, limited inventory makes it challenging to fulfill all customer orders. As you signed up for updates on the HP TouchPad, we wanted you to know that we are officially out of stock. Some retailers will have some stock available, but our online inventory is depleted.'"
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Apparently, I signed up to be notified if they ever released them for retail sale and got no updates, except for a "we're first offering them for sale (for a limited time) to employees" email. Nothing since.
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I recieved the two I ordered.
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Uh (Score:1)
That's not all they're out of!
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No they didnt. (Score:2)
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Re:ALL OF YOU are in the Marketroid's trap. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this is just a plain ol' fashioned cluster fsck.
Buy WebOS from Palm. Get it to a point where its actually cool beans. Release a product that first users proclaim may in fact be an iPad killer. Kill the product and dump it nearly at cost. Discover that people are really interested in the product, and promises them you'll keep them in touch and that there will probably be enough to sell another round (first hinting that there may be as many as a million, and ultimately that there'll at least be 200,000.) Then after waiting months, being told "Tough noogies!", we sold them all to BEST BUY and other distributors. So you're not going to see these beauties without our strategic partner clipping you for fistful of Benjamins.
So Meg, I get it, HPs little serial brain fart left its partners out in the cold, holding their manly bits and looking really stupid. Embarrassing really. So your fist act as Honcho du Jour, was to get down on your knees and give them a big warm smooch. Make their owwy all better. The thing is, you did it on the backs of your customers. The people who actually thought something of HPs products and their commitment to customer satisfaction. So what we have now to show for our interest and patient waiting is an electronic nasty-gram of your middle finger, telling us once more that HP doesn't give a flying fsck at a rolling doughnut for it's customers. You know, a business does this enough, and after a little while, surprise, it doesn't have any customers.
So I say screw the Touchpad, You've "Lucyed" me one time too many, I don't wanna play football with you anymore. Meg has already indicated that she's killing WebOS, the Touchpad is a dead end, a lost cause, and Touchpad owners and users can go straight to heel, because the entire product line has no future. This has all been a exercise in brain damage and a company that has so lost its way that it's found new and creative ways to piss off its supply chain, its retailers, its customers and its strategic partners. Meg, sweetheart, I understand your hands are full and honestly I see how you got yourself wedged, So I'll cut you some slack, but if this is any hint of HPs future, I don't see a rosy outcome for you or HP.
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HP, AMD, and Nokia all seem to be suffering from the same illness. High CEO turnover with each CEO looking to make ends meet. If Ballmer gets fired, I'll expect MS to catch it and be in the tank in ten years. Not that I like Ballmer or that I think he's doing a good job. At least he's a long-term CEO that is keeping the giant profitable.
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One difference: if Ballmer is fired, he will be replaced by another long-time MS executive. IBM does the same sort of thing.
HP is different. HP hires outsiders from completely different sorts of businesses.
Last Batch (Score:3)
In the firesale, I ordered about a half dozen Touchpads from various websites, and the only one that ended up coming through was from HP Small/Medium Business.
I ordered on August 21st, and I received September 21st.
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Odd, I bought 3 from BestBuy that morning. They were all shipped from different distribution centers, but they all arrived within a week.
Price Point (Score:2)
Re:Price Point (Score:5, Funny)
Does this count as irrefutable proof that $500 is more than most people are willing to spend for a tablet, but $100-200 is perfectly reasonable? Perhaps not irrefutable, but still, maybe some other tech companies will take notice.
I wonder if any other companies will notice [amazon.com]?
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This [amazon.com] is more functional and portable - no stylus required. Steve Jobs hated styluses...
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Re:Price Point (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's irrefutable proof that the tablets out there so far aren't worth $500.
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A big, glorified demi-phone like the iPad is worth $200-300 tops in the eyes of the tech-savvy consumer. Now its on HP and others to undercut the faddists and pull common-sense miracles out of t
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so far, the iPad2 is one of the few serious options for programming books and scientific papers. I mean, it's not exactly suited to the task, but many other tablets are just impossible.
For this particular task, it sounds like all you would really care about is screen quality and size, since otherwise they can all display PDFs and ePubs. If so, then why not any of Android tablets? You could even get a 7" one - it'll likely be more convenient to hold when reading (iPad and other 10" tablets are too heavy to hold in one hand for too long), while still having the same resolution.
Though, frankly, even Honeycomb's 800x1280 is not all that good for PDFs (page fit to screen), much less iPad's 768
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Funnily enough, the "zomg all iPads/iPods/iPhones/XBox360s/PS3s/Prius/Starbucks/Round Glasses/Doc Martens/Anything Not Blessed By The Slashdot KnowAlls are being bought by people sold on the hype" argument is just weak. Good one on "faddists" though - that's relatively new.
On the topic of HP "undercutting" the iPad, do you not think that someone at the company (or anyone with any connection to a company capable of building a tablet) hasn't thought of that? So far the closest anyone has come is the Eee Pad T
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The current business
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it's kinda funny, but webOS comes/came pretty close to what you're describing. Root was accessible by enabling "dev" mode through a special but officially documented code (the konami code for some versions), no cracking needed; the underlying linux os had a number of gnu tools already, and you can use the ipkg framework to install more; then there's Preware, a still thriving open source community / app catalog tool full of free unsigned apps and OS patches which palm and hp both officially sanctioned. The m
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Last quarter, Apple sold 11 million iPads. Motorola sold 100,000 zooms.
Re:Price Point (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's proof that people will only buy non-apple tablets when they can get $500 of hardware for $100.
That's not the same as a $100 tablet.
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The samsung galaxy Tab 10.1 costs around $170 to manufacture. The iPad 2 costs even less.
I think you meant to say the iPad 2 costs almost twice as much, but spelled a couple words completely wrong. The bill of materials is $326.60.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-14/tech/30012225_1_ipad-apple-stores-pa-semi
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If you want to argue that, you have absolutely no clue how wholesale purchasing works...
If I buy something in a bulk of 1, well, I get pretty close to retail pricing, even if it's from a wholesale outlet. If I buy 1,000, it gets better. When we get over 100,000, the manufacturer will pretty much bend over backwards to satisfy you. Of course, when you start pushing the pricing down below their cost, that's when it gets farmed out to China.
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Apple sold over 11 million iPads last quarter, during which they made well over US$6B in profit. Apple has the best and cheapest supply chain in the business, which other manufacturers are trying to match. Apple isn't making 40% margin off of a product with parts cost of $326 while selling retail at $499. That leaves no room for any other part of the chain to make any money.
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I can see why you didn't log in - nothing you said is true. But nice try.
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Tablets are horrendously overpriced. The samsung galaxy Tab 10.1 costs around $170 to manufacture.
It's pretty standard to have items retail for 2 times the wholesale cost. There's too much competition in the market to believe that tablets are overpriced by a large amount.
Re:Price Point (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's proof that when you have two products at the same price point, one of which is inferior in almost every way—bigger, heavier, no rear-facing camera, slower CPU (or maybe it's just the higher overhead of WebOS), no native apps, limited selection of apps, less display brightness—people will choose the better product.... About the only hardware advantage the TouchPad had was stereo speakers....
If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.
If you're going to compete at a price point, you have to at least come close to hitting all the major bullet-point hardware features of the other products at that price point. If not, expect your sales to be disappointing. The only time this isn't true is if you have some other major design enhancement that blows away the competition in some other area, and even then, it takes years for something that subtle to result in significant disruption in an established market. It's unclear whether HP had that with WebOS. What is clear is that they were not willing to stick it out in that market long enough to find out.
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The sound is excellent -- it's not just stereo speakers. That is one of my favorite features.
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If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.
i like this analogy: ipad is the mercedes (or whatever) of tablets. sure people buy lots of hondas, they are good cars. but they they don't pay mercedes prices for them.
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They do if they're badged 'NSX'
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no native apps
I'm pretty sure I've seen numerous claims that webOS has native code apps, and specifically SDL is available - so porting games is a piece of cake.
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Don't be retarded. There are very, very few people who buy on "hardware price point" anymore. Usually, they're the geeks who wipe the machine and put their own (or pirated) software on it almost immediately who do that.
Everyone else looks at software. Applications, features, and capabilities. The Touchpads were quite capable for what they were (more so than the iPads I've seen, by far - so unless I'm not seeing all that's to offer in that department? - faster, more responsive, better UI, and a better browse
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Speed is not simply measured by Mhz alone. Here is a side by side review of the Ipad vs touchpad:
The iPad 2's 1GHz dual-core Apple A5 processor makes quick work of app loading and is generally responsive, such as when panning in Google Earth or parsing documents in iWork Pages. By contrast, despite its 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, the TouchPad feels slow -- even for tasks like opening emails that are practically instantaneous on other tablets. That slowness is in evidence throughout the tablet
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If so, then this is a good example of why you need to test your products thoroughly before you ship them. Once your product is perceived to be slow, it's very hard to destroy that misperception, even if you fix whatever problem caused the slowness....
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How often do you actually need that function?
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said by someone who's never video chatted with anyone.
You'd never ask that question if you'd ever partaken in the activity.
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No, I just use it to talk to people because I am talking to them, not showing them stupid crap around the room or work. Maybe it's a developed habit because turning my laptop around is such a difficult maneuver. . . wait, no it isn't. Must just be because I'm not showing them stupid crap.
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You're right, just because I don't use it doesn't invalidate the functionality, but if no one uses it, it does. My original post asked how often anyone actually used the rear camera, because my assumption was that, like me, no one else would have anything more than the most occasional, trivial use for it. Apple could bundle a USB CD burner with it and list it as a "feature," and I'm sure some people would occasionally use it, but that doesn't really make it a better device.
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Where does seeing the other person's reaction come into play? Again, just turn the tablet around to use the front camera - it's really not that hard.
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It's proof that $500 is more than people will pay for a tablet that is not an iPad.
HP's PC business is sound, because they sell their not-as-good-as-an-Apple computers, running a more-popular OS, for less than an Apple. Trying to sell a device that is no better than an Apple, running a less popular OS, for the same price as Apple's... was idiotic. If they couldn't sell it for less (due to manufacturing/distribution costs and profit margins), they never should have put it into production in the first place
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yea ok if your computer is a pentium 3
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Or a smartphone.
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pure hardware companies aren't interested in selling their hardware at a loss, or even at break-even. they might as well not put the effort into making it in the first place
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Does this count as irrefutable proof that $500 is more than most people are willing to spend for a tablet, but $100-200 is perfectly reasonable? Perhaps not irrefutable, but still, maybe some other tech companies will take notice.
Hmm, not at all. It's proof that the cheaper, the more you sell. But we didn't really need proof of that now, did we?
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Actually, if you had proof of that in the general case, then you'd be inline for something like the nobel for economics (yes, not a real nobel, I know). See: Giffen Goods, Veblen Goods.
Do you mean to say that there is somewhere someone doubting that slashing the price by 80% on an existing product does raise the sales number?
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I think what's happening is that everyone else saw Apple price the iPad at around $500, and concluded that this was a benchmark price. Either that or Apple have tied up the supply chain so efficiently that it's very hard for other manufacturers to offer something similar for much less money.
In any case, for whatever reason everyone else decided "We can build one of those and flog it at a good profit at $500". The neglected one important point.
Apple can sell it at $500 because they've spent the last fifteen
Filled my Cancelled Order (Score:4, Interesting)
I had managed to get two orders for a 16gb model in on the Small/Medium Business site. One was before they said they were out of stock. The second one I placed after they had declared that stock was depleted. There was a link going around that let you add it to your cart even though the product page said "out of stock."
They sent an email not long after stating that my order would be cancelled due to being placed after they ran out. Then, a few weeks ago I got two emails saying my order would be shipped within two weeks, specifying two different order numbers.
Sure enough, this past week I got two 16gb Touchpads via Fedex. So, it wasn't just the employees that wiped out the supply, but all the past-posted orders as well.
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This happened to me, too. I did't know about the link, I just used the store and, over several hours, made my way through the steps of ordering. I started Saturday evening, finished Monday, and was told later in emails I was too late. Two orders, three 16gb models, $99 plus tax each, they canceled the orders, resurrected them, then filled them. I thought these were going straight to Android or Ubuntu but, you know what? They are so superior to the iPad for what I need them for (they act as flash drives
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"She was turned off by the iPad because she couldn't find the apostrophe."
FFR: Just hold down comma for a moment....
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I received my $99 unit from HP yesterday and love WebOS. I think that the browser could be faster, but beyond that, I'm a fan. It's got me thinking seriously about nabbing a used Pre on E-Bay to complement the 'pad. I was actually saving my pennies to buy the 16GB tablet at $500 when HP announced the $99 deal. I had already decided to buy it, but it was beyond my limit for a casual purchase.
When they announced that they would discontinue the TouchPad, I decided to buy anyway assuming that there would be
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http://rootzwiki.com/topic/3477-releasealpha2discussion-cyanogenmod-team-touchpad-port/ [rootzwiki.com]
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Yea I dont really understand it either, unless a few of them had families to give them out to, but this is slashdot the closest thing to a family most have around here is a porn site and a bag of cheetos... its technology, it aint going to get more expensive with time
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The fuss is because it's a hundred dollar tablet that isn't four years old, not because it's actually anything special.
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Well, I can say that I wasn't very fond of the WebOS interface at all.
When I bought them, I hadn't researched the possibility of Android on them well enough. I mistook "It could be done", for "It has been done". Now that CyanogenMod has their alpha version available, I'm very happy. I installed alpha 2 last weekend on mine, and installed it on my girlfriends this evening. The first install session was kind of hit and miss, because I hadn't already done it. Once I got eve
good buy at twice the price (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried like hell to get in on the firesale. It didn't bother me that I didn't manage to get one, but the several rounds of "you're in, we've charged your card, your ship date is X... oops, psyche, no TP for you" pissed me right the hell off. Nonetheless, as a palm pre owner and a bit of a fanboy, I really wanted one. I finally caved and grabbed one off craigslist, unopened, for $200. For the hardware and compared to what else you can get out there, $200 is still a steal.
So now I have one, and of course I've got it dual-booting with CM7, but you know what? I still leave it in webOS most of the time. Aside from the glaring lack of an sftp client app for webOS, it does everything I want it to do. And it's slicker, more elegant, just hands-down nicer to use than either iOS or android (Ice Cream might make me re-evaluate, but as things stand). WebOS was the BeOS of our time, and I just hope it will live for at least a few more cycles on the hardware. Two hundred bucks *easily* well spent.
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Similar situation here, I ordered from about 8 places, one of them finally came through, not at $99, but still a darn good deal.
WebOS is a good OS. I wish there were a few more apps, but I'm doing ok and the remote desktop client is a quick fix for when I have to do something too complex for the Touchpad.
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I've fluttered through various rounds of webOSdoctor and don't have it installed at the moment, but carving out an ext3 slice and installing lxde ubuntu on it also plugs a few holes. They use quite a few nice hacks to make it touch-screen friendly, but it's still not quite as nice as the native webOS. I was using it mainly for gFTP before the CM7 alpha came out.
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I have to say, after using WebOS for 2 months or so before finally being able to dual boot CM7, and as someone who owns an SGS2, WebOS is MUCH more user-friendly than Android. I still use WebOS on my Touchpad unless there's something it can't do (for instance, I haven't been able to get into outlook based mail accounts with it.)
I'm hoping ICS will fix that issue, but still, I think if more people would have invested in WebOS it would have been a serious contender.
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I ditching mine. (Score:1)
I wonder... liar, liar, pants on fire? (Score:2)
Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.
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Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.
Got it too... Announcement is legit.... Sorry.... V
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Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.
I wonder because I had two emails registered to receive the update my work one and my personal email. I got it on my work email but not my personal. I know I know "pics or it didn't happen" The funny thing was I just put up the blog like a week ago to document the building of my rep-rap. I wanted to submit the email but I couldn't because it wasn't on any sites yet. I figured my blog would have to do. Yeah,.. sucks to be the blogger of unknown repute as you can imagine.
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Here it is Saturday morning and still no copy of it for me. No matter... it's still bad news no matter what form the messenger takes.
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Did anyone else besides this blogger of unknown repute receive this alleged e-mail notice? I didn't. I requested the same e-mail updates as he allegedly did, yet I've received nothing at all. The only explanation I can conjecture is that HP's SMTP servers are dragging the process out for who knows how many hours or days.
I received one as well. Shame that HP showed no care for those that have used webOS since the week it came out. Three years ago. Glad i ended up getting a TP other ways.
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Yes. I received the out of stock message late last night. So the message is confirmed.
Out of touch completely (Score:2)
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I got mine... (Score:2)
I placed two orders. The first was using the cart trick when HP was saying that they were out of stock and was for 3 touchpads. The second was the next day just after HP had updated their SMB site to say that they were out of 16GB models but still had 32GB models and it was also for 3 touchpads.
The reason for the second order was just in case the first order was cancelled. At least with the second order I could argue that HP was advertising stock at the time I placed the order. I ended up getting all 6.
Subject should read "HP Officially Out of Touch" (Score:2)
There, fixed it for you.
webOS was OK, but Android wins with its apps (Score:2)
I got my UK TouchPad in the firesale (116 pounds for 32GB model - yes, rip-off Britain strikes again) and whilst webOS is OK, it's not as stunning as people make out. The card model isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread - your "flick to minimise" has to be precisely co-ordinated otherwise you end up having to use the bezel button instead (the number of times I've just scrolled instead of minimising is annoying). The lack of a close button on the windows mean two actions instead of one (flick+flick or
So why did HP buy Palm again? (Score:2)
This whole scenario seems incredible. HP buys Palm, assets, people, hardware - then drops the hardware to build their own. Fine they are a hardware company- makes sense. Then they say they are going to roll out WebOS everywhere to interconnect printers, phone, tablets, PCs, etc. Then the announce WebOS is dead (except as an embedded OS), then announce they are getting out of the PC business altogether. The whole damn thing is madness.