HP Reviving the $99 Touch Pad On December 11th 121
Frankie70 writes "Starting Sunday, December 11th at 6:00 p.m. Central time, 16GB and 32GB Touchpads will be available on HP's ebay store. A $79 accessory bundle will also be available, which includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. The caveat with this deal is that these are refurbished TouchPads rather than the brand new models sold during the first firesale."
Er, no. (Score:5, Funny)
As a famous jerkwad once said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
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Re:Er, no. (Score:5, Informative)
Just speaking as a person who tried and failed multiple times to get orders in for one of the firesale units with multiple vendors -- and went to multiple retail stores in search of one... only to be shut out by the douchebags who bought dozens at a time. And whose attempts to get orders in with a certain few vendors ended up tying up charges against my credit cards for weeks as, slowly -- one by one -- each vendor admitted "yeah, we just don't have enough. sorry for sitting on your cash."
Have fun, all you wild-eyed bargain hunters. I'll just sit this one out.
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Re:Er, no. (Score:5, Informative)
My mother-in-law ordered one from HP and was met with silence. For the entire month she put up with it, they'd charge her account $150 every friday and then return it. Effectively this meant she was missing $150 even though she didn't have the item. Additionally, she had typo'd her address when she submitted it. When she called to correct it, surprise surprise, they couldn't. All she could do was cancel and resubmit the order... which would have meant no Touchpad for her. While technically her fault, why the call center she talked to couldn't modify her order is beyond me.
My experience was a little better. I didn't mind the $150 disappearing and the address was correct when I submitted it, but HP was TERRIBLE about telling me wtf was going on. On their web page the order status was set to something bizarre like "ORDER COMPLETE" or something that made it sound like my Touchpad was right here. It wasn't. When I tried to email them I was given a generic answer about how I'd get my order within a few weeks and they're very sorry and it took three paragraphs to explain these two simple concepts. It was definitely a source of frustration.
I wouldn't say it "doesn't hurt". It may not hurt enough, but unless they've dramatically improved their customer service, it likely will hurt some.
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I've been looking around and don't see much about it. I thought I'd read after the initial firesale, there was a lot of headway made to root and install it on these HP tablets, but not much is coming up with searches now...
I found this: alpha release announcement [cyanogenmod.com], but is there anything more out there?
Re:Er, no. (Score:4, Informative)
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Fo
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(This really isn't a reply to your post... it started off that way but I'm just enjoying ranting about HP right now... please forgive me.)
I got mine on the second batch, and it's okay. I have an iPad and a Galaxy Tab also and I think it's the weakest of the three. That said, I'm reasonably happy with it. I just wanted it as a always-by-the-couch tablet. So hopefully you'll see what I mean when I say 'instant gratification' wasn't the problem.
I was probably a little too brief in my last post, there was
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Re:Er, no. (Score:5, Informative)
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MEG! (Score:3)
Maybe this is a good sign that HP's returning to their roots.
At least ebay has a chance of keeping up with the load, as opposed to HP's shopping site. oh, how embarrassing for a wannabe "services" company...
Re:Er, no. (Score:4, Informative)
HP is one of the vendors I tried to buy from who sat on my $150 for 3+ weeks, renewing the hold every Friday like clockwork until finally canceling it with no attempt to reconcile with me as a customer.
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Just speaking as a person who tried and failed multiple times to get orders in for one of the firesale units with multiple vendors -- and went to multiple retail stores in search of one... only to be shut out by the douchebags who bought dozens at a time. And whose attempts to get orders in with a certain few vendors ended up tying up charges against my credit cards for weeks as, slowly -- one by one -- each vendor admitted "yeah, we just don't have enough. sorry for sitting on your cash."
You should have brought that up with your credit card bank - most merchant agreements don't allow merchants to charge your card before they ship the product (unless you agreed to it ahead of time). At the very least, they won't make you pay the charge while you wait for the merchant to refund it.
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How fucking cheap are you? And how little do you value your time?
You spent many many hours trying to buy a product that was discounted to a few tens or (just about) hundreds of dollars cheaper than its competitors. Why not just suck up the money, value your time more, and just buy one on eBay or a similar model at full price?
Idiot.
Re:Er, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's something people forget about. At some point it starts to make more sense to just pull some overtime or get a second job than it does to run around trying to save a few bucks.
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That is exactly what I did. After going through the gyrations and trials detailed by posters above, and failing, I just grabbed one off Craigslist for $180. Still a great deal, and I'm happy with the purchase, although my status as a pre owner and webOS fanboy may cloud that a bit. My BeOS-oh-who-I-love-thee tablet is perfectly fine for now at sub-$200, and sometime early next year it will be running ICS. I haven nothing really to bitch about.
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> Something is wrong with a chance to score a tablet for $99?
Not at all, and now you have the advantage of getting an Alpha of Android, too. Not from HP, mind you.
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Your rambling is nonsensical. A tablet is indeed a toy for simple use in limited situations, I agree. It's worth $99 to many people. It's _not_ worth $500+, I agree with you there and you're an idiot if you spend $500 on a iPod XL.
As for software, you are clueless. Of course you can sell software for a loss. If I spend $50k on developers to make a piece of software then sell it for a penny, expecting to sell 10000 copies, I have sold the software at a loss. It's really not complicated to understand.
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It's a form factor, whose only purpose is to be a giant e-penis for the hipster and PHB crowd.
Remember two years ago when everybody was saying this and suddenly stopped?
P.S.: How in the world would "selling" software ever be a "loss".
It costs money to produce. If it's never recouped then it's a loss. Look up the phrase 'no free lunch'.
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Not really. Selling at a loss means that you're selling each item for less than the cost to produce that item. It has nothing to do with making up your investment to create the product (R&D time in the case of a physical product) and is based entirely on manufacturing/distribution costs. For software to be sold at a loss, that would mean for less than the price of the box/media and the distribution of the media, or less than the price of electronic distribution.
Fool me? (Score:3)
For 99 bucks its a deal. Even if its a non product at this point it will still do what it does now for a while.
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I agree, you should certainly not try to buy any of these. Err, you should also tell all of your friends not to as well. .>
Hello, I am going to tell everyone whom I don't particularly like about the HP deal.
Every political insider who calls me for my vote or a political donation will hear about this bargain for their staff this weekend.
This is the most lively, dead tablet platform. (Score:1)
I can't wait for them to start with the 7" tablet death march.
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chances of scoring on? (Score:2)
So, what do you think the actual chances of scoring one are? Geeze, this is gonna be a free for all
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No Love for the Touch Pad? (Score:2)
Re:No Love for the Touch Pad? (Score:5, Informative)
HP isn't exiting WebOS (Score:5, Interesting)
I think their initial intention was to throw WebOS and the TouchPad overboard, but consider that tablets are already racing to the bottom. HP's firesale pricing happens to already be there, and maybe a better strategy is to become a strong #2 in the market so they can upsell you to a more normally-priced $149 tablet next year. That would make more sense that just pulling the cord.
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Yeah, this. The whole dump-WebOS thing was Apothekar's idea, colossally dumb. Might as well stick with it.
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Re:HP isn't exiting WebOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the multi-billion dollar loss WebOS has been so far, merely selling a few more next year at a slightly higher price doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me.
There's a bit of a false assumption here. The money that HP has lost on WebOS is a sunk cost. It's gone and it's not coming back, no matter what happens. HP should be thinking entirely of the future at this point. Can WebOS generate a worthwhile profit from today onward? If so, they should hold on to it, even if it never makes back the initial investment.
People often don't think this way. If I lose a ton of money on an asset I'm likely to get rid of it, even if it stands to be mildly profitable in the future. HP shouldn't be thinking that way. (I should point out that I have no idea if they actuall are or not.)
That said, I'd love an open source WebOS, if only to keep Google honest.
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Uh, iOS *is* a stripped-down version of OS X with a touch-optimised UI stuck on top...
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I'm pretty willing to bet that the Windows 8 installed on the average tablet isn't going to have all the stuff the Windows 8 on the average PC does.
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Yeah, considering that the TouchPad has a $318 BOM, it makes total sense to sell a bunch at a $219 loss, then sell more next year at a mere $179 loss. Profits can't be far behind using that strategy.
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Hey, it worked(?) for the PS3!
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Tablets are racing to the bottom? How do you figure? They sold the TouchPad at a loss just to get rid of their inventory, and the Kindle Fire is the only other data point of a credible tablet under $200. And by all accounts, it feels like a tablet that's under $200, which is not a good thing. There's a reason the decent tablets cost at least $400-500. It's because you can't make a good one that's cheaper with the technology that's out there now.
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Nook Color: $200
Nook Tablet: $250
Novo7 [slashdot.org]: $100
Blackberry playbook [electronista.com]: $199
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All 7 inch tablets, which are significantly cheaper then a 10 inch tablet like the touchpad.
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It depends on how much these things cost to manufacture. Considering that they were originally supposed to be around $500, I wouldn't be surprised if they cost more than $150 to manufacture.
Whenever the subject of Touchpads come up, someone starts to argue, "Well they're selling a ton of these now, so they should ramp up production and they'll make tons of money!" It kind of fails to acknowledge, though, that they're selling them really cheaply because they're trying to ditch inventory, and supposedly se
Should I buy one? (Score:2)
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If I invest the money in the touchpad until I get a girlfriend, how long will until either venture is pointless?
Re:Should I buy one? (Score:5, Informative)
I have both the Touchpad and the iPad 2. I like the Touchpad interface better than the iPad interface.
That being said, you have to understand that there are a limited number of Apps for WebOS. So you won't be able to find WebOS versions of your favorite apps. But it is a great for browsing, email, twitter, facebook, and can be used as a picture frame / photo viewer as it has a slideshow mode when plugged in. This alone is worth the $$.
You currently have the option to dual boot to an older version of Andriod (Cyanogenmod) that has been developed. It's still in beta, so there are bugs to be worked out. On the horizon is the pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow, Ice Cream Sandwich. It is anticipated that a version of Ice Cream Sandwich for the Touchpad will be available before March of 2012. This opens up the Touchpad to the Andriod marketplace and makes it a cheap modern table.
Re:Should I buy one? (Score:5, Funny)
So... they will soon be for sale at Ikea?
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Should I *try* to get one?
FTFY, and btw, yes... they're excellent hardware for the price (and WebOS is also interesting, even if you end up throwing android on it)
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I have an iPad. I have a Touchpad. I'm not a big app buyer. Browser, maps, play back videos I download to the Touchpad (it acts like a flash drive when connected to any operating system), email, VPN, some light typing, YouTube. All the flash in a browser you'd want. Once you learn how to close a window (just toss it off the top of the display) you're good to go. Within two days of getting my Touchpad I've stopped using my iPad. Literally. I haven't gone back. What about music. Come on, is that what
so tempting (Score:2)
I'm so tempted to get one of these as a toy. Also, they run Android REALLY WELL, apparently. So even if WebOS isn't to your liking they're still quite useful.
this may be an unexpected lesson (Score:2)
to the evolving low end consumer electronics market. You can try to sell these at a good margin and turn enough volume to make a fair profit, or you can go the walmart route and make a cheap product, and set your margins very low and make up the same bottom line in volume. Or maybe a smaller bottom line, but profit is profit. At the end of the year, if you clear a thousand or clear a few million, you're still ahead either way, and your effort was worth your while. Obviously it's better to clear millions
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Except this ain't profit, this is dumping inventory at a loss, like the first time.
Re:this may be an unexpected lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
So, your master plan is to make up the profit in volume of sales?
So, the volume price is $99, the manufacturing cost *per TouchPad* is $318 (http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx).
So, HP "make" -$219 per TouchPad. I can see why they need volume sales to make up the profit... ;)
I'm not sure where the myth that these sorts of devices cost buttons to make and are just sold at crazy high "all gravy" margins? Oh wait, it's what they think Apple are doing with the iPad. Even the really good Android competitors to the iPad are only $100 or so less - so still in the $400 range.
Selling them at $99 does not make for a sound business plan unless you plan to make up the money by some other channel (like having your games console as a loss leader, for example). A $219 loss per tablet is a pretty steep loss leader though, by anyone's measure.
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I'm not sure where the myth that these sorts of devices cost buttons to make and are just sold at crazy high "all gravy" margins? Oh wait, it's what they think Apple are doing with the iPad. Even the really good Android competitors to the iPad are only $100 or so less - so still in the $400 range.
Sure, but it's easy to perceive those as being crazy-high margin too. The specs of many of these things are comparable to a sub-$200 netbook - does a touchscreen and better battery life really cost that much?
/has a transformer and loves it, but still can't help wondering if he's a mug for buying it
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Well, the touch driver chip in the HP unit is $11, the display is $60 and the touch input device itself is about $50 - it all adds up. There's $60 you don;t need to spend while building a netbook.
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Most "decent" tablets also use an IPS display (display angle is IMO more important on a tablet, as you're more likely to use it off-axis), while most netbooks have pretty crappy displays.
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> So, your master plan is to make up
> the profit in volume of sales?
It's HP.
Think inkjet printers.
They're going to be selling you e-ink every couple of weeks, somehow, some way.
Just wait.
Grrrrr... (Score:2)
I've read about this sale on 4 different sites toda and it isn't even noon yet.
I think it fair to say if it is getting this much publicity- no matter how hard I try- I will not have any success trying to get one.
What (Score:2)
Re:What (Score:4, Informative)
These are refurbs. And they're refurbs of an EOL'd tablet that they're not making any more of, and won't have spare parts to fix (since they're using all the spare parts to make as many as possible to reduce the bath they're taking by scrapping the product). Pretty questionable purchase, but for $100 maybe it's worth it.
My sister has two - one for each kid. The games they had seemed fun, and if they break it it's not like it's a $600 iPad.
Quick! (Score:3, Funny)
Where's my pepper spray?
I'm gonna try to buy one. (Score:4, Insightful)
For obvious reasons:
- The TP is rooted, sort of [rootzwiki.com], so the OS is no longer an issue. If Cyanogen [cyanogenmod.com] is working on it, do not bet against them. You will lose. And there is another team working on this.
- For the money, even stock, it's cool.
- Even a 90-day warranty should give you time to find out if it's a lemon.
- There will be a support community out there.
Now HP is right to toss these refurbs out for several reasons:
- Most of these came back from people too lazy or stupid to follow instructions and resolve their issue.
- If HP can't repair defective units, by whatever means, then all you TP owners have tablets that are just as dead as Elvis, it's only a matter of time. I'm trusting these were either repaired or reloaded.
- No point in keeping backstock of refurbs beyond the warranty needs.
- HP could be deciding that the end of the TP debacle is the day they have NO TPs available. Period. And the sooner the better.
So stop yer whinin' and get in line.
Oh, and all you crybabies out there with your sad tales of trying to buy one back when - I've heard all the complaints. All par for the course. Bad things happen during these closeouts, and resellers are often either morons or thieves. Caveat Emptor. Same as it ever was.
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Even if it's a bit defective or scuffed, this is still a cheap, decent tablet.
Far better than a bloody BlackBerry one, that's for sure.
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I was able to get one of the 32GB models for $150. I've been running the CM Android on it for a couple months now and it's pretty good. It's called an alpha, but so far the only big issue I've had was with WPA on the alpha 2 release (wifi going into sleep mode didn't wake up properly, had to forget the network and reconnect). I use it for music, web surfing, Netflix, and a little ebook reading. For $150 that's a pretty good deal, if you can get one.
US Only (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps an important point - the HP eBay store only ships within the US via UPS. So even if all you wanted was the accessory kit, if you're outside the US, you're SOL.
Those outside the US will just have to bid on them after arbitrage.
And the site's open to HP employees on the 11th. General public is on Monday ,the 12th.
Only good part is it's 2 per customer.
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eBay at its quietest times probably handles an order of magnitude more traffic than HP's site at its busiest. If eBay could cope with the iPad and iPhone releases, I'm pretty sure it can handle HP's barrel-scraping.
why not December 7? (Score:2)
Lame. (Score:1)
I signed in right before the sale started, and clicked "buy it now" as soon as they dropped the price. This took me to a sign-in screen again, and as after signing in again, the next page timed out.
After about 20 minutes of hitting reload to try to get the payment page to load, the listing was removed. Then I moved on to the 32GB version; when I tried to buy it, it would give me a database error every time I tried to buy one. If I hit refresh on the listing, I could see the
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Same here, buy button does nothing.
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Did anyone get one of the tablets?
"Thank you for your purchase of HP TouchPad Wi-Fi 32GB Refurbished | FB359UAR#ABA. We are processing it to arrive as quickly as possible."
Yep; I managed to snag one while I was doing a bit of work in Photoshop. I can imagine that it might have been very frustrating were I not actually also occupying myself with something else while sitting in front of the computer.
Re:AARRGGG!!!! Obligatory xkcd (Score:1)
Why does everyone feel the need to link to a XKCD comic when it is NOT related to the discussion / article?
http://xkcd.com/16/ [xkcd.com]
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Subject: Oblig XKCD
Why does everyone feel the need to link to a XKCD comic when it is NOT related to the discussion / article?
I think he already answered your question - Oblig is short for Obligatory: Required by a legal, moral, or other rule; compulsory
How could someone *not* post an obligatory XKCD link?
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Re:Oblig XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
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He should at least show enough initiative to write a bot to pick a xkcd relevant to the story. And then post the corresponding goatkcd (W:G).
Re:Refurbished stuff has (Score:5, Informative)
I've purchased dozens of refurbished consumer electronics, and I know other people who have as well, nearly all of those devices are still working just fine months and years beyond their warranty expiration. I've seen maybe 5-10% failure rate on refurbs, which is about the same as my record with "brand new" consumer electronics. YMMV, IANAL, KTHXBYE
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Most consumer electronics that are factory refurbished end up with completely new parts simply because the parts aren't repairable in the traditional sense. They whip in a new part and solder it in. So the refurbs are as good as the originals.
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I know we like to hate everything on Slashdot, but it might help to include your specific grievance.