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.'"
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.
Re:Price Point (Score:2, Informative)
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; even network-based actions like downloading files takes longer on the TouchPad than on the iPad 2, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Xoom -- including on the same network from the same location. The slowness is epecially noticeable at the first launch of an application or document. The TouchPad's speed also seems to vary, as if some invisible background process is executing. HP says some slowdown can occur after accounts are set up, as the TouchPad's Synergy API weaves them into services and applications that can support them. But these slowdowns have persisted for a week, so I doubt that answer. Whatever the cause, it's annoying.
In some instances, as when launching applications, the TouchPad gives you an indication that it's working, but in others, it seems to take a few seconds before it indicates that it received your input and is processing it. I frequently would tap a button again because I couldn't tell that anything was happening.
There are extremely few TouchPad apps available to see if this speed issue extends to them. But the TouchPad is definitely slow to start up from powered-off state: It takes 77 seconds -- more than a minute. By comparison, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 takes 25 seconds, the iPad 2 takes 35 seconds, and my 2011-edition MacBook Pro takes 127 seconds. If you're looking for instant-on, let the tablet go to sleep rather than powering it down.