The HP Touchpad Finally Finds Love

I'm continuing to lust after the $99 closeout HP touchpad but with the exception of a brief window in time this past Sunday/Monday it's begining to look like they are about as common as a humble politician.

HP's web site did claim more would be coming up until sometime between Tuesday evening and the wee hours of Wednesday morning but now they just say "Out of Stock". Online reports indicate that even people who work for HP aren't sure if or when more stock will show up.
There seems to be a lot of supply in the grey market with EBay and Amazon's marketplace showing several sources willing to sell for around $230 to $260 as I write this. Actually some people are asking a lot more than that but I doubt they are getting many bites with lower prices being available.
It's kind of odd that HP has been sending mixed signals this week. They should know their supply chain well enough to understand what they have in the pipe. They seemed ot think they were going to have more, now they are saying the opposite. I have a couple of different theories about where the remaining supply has gone.

My first theory is that they realize they low balled their clearance price a bit and are trying to figure out how to extract a few extra dollars from their remaining stock gracefully. Maybe a big shareholder called up and read them the riot act.
My second theory is that HP is going to sell all of their remaining units through channel partners, possibly to help assuage some of the frustration those partners likely have thanks to HP abandoning the tablet market suddenly. Heck, it was only a couple of weeks back that they were talking about being comfortable with the number two spot in the tablet market. A lot of people have gotten whiplash on that one.

Actually a third theory just occurred to me. Based on the frenzy around the $99 clearance HP has decided they really do have a future in the tablet market and is regrouping to announce they've changed their mind. I don't have an opinion on whether they should or shouldn't have abandoned the tablet market but if this one is true they need to take a reality check. The only thing the recent feeding frenzy proved is that even flawed products can be attractive if the price is low enough. We Americans love a sale more than just about anything else.

A lot of these bargain basement HP touchpads are going to end up with Android installed. That is my plan if I get my hands on one. I'll give WebOS a brief test drive but I have zero desire to learn a third platform, particularly one that is apparently dead.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• Everything you want to know about the HP TouchPad: news, reviews (zdnet.com)
• Blog - The Great HP Fire Sale of 2011 (technologyreview.com)

HP Tablet Hunting And Garrison Keillor

My quest for a cheap HP tablet may yet bear fruit as HP may have more available later this week. I have my fingers crossed. I'm a total junkie when it comes to tech toys and even spectacular failures have a bit of appeal if the price is right. I'm periodically hitting refresh on the HP page hoping to get lucky.

As I write this my wife and I are on our way to see Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegone fame. I've been a casual fan of Keillor's for many years now so I've been looking forward to this for awhile. We almost missed the show though as it was originally on our calendar for tomorrow night. Thankfully through an unlikely series of coincidences we found out around lunch time that it's tonight. It's nice when stuff like that works out in your favor as tickets for a show that has already occurred are even less useful than expired milk as there is always a chance the milk might turn into cottage cheese or something else marginally useful.

I've decided I need to put a lot more effort into my blog entry titles. Apparently "foo/bar/whatever" isn't a very enticing labeling based on the number of page impressions I get on those kinds of posts versus ones where I use something that looks like a question or statement. If any aspiring bloggers are reading this, please learn from my mistake. It only took me a year and a half to figure out.

Of course following this advice is easier said than done. It's not like I don't want to come up with pithy titles. If I were good at that I'd probably be in marketing or advertising or maybe comedy rather than technology.

My favorite new social networking site is FourSquare. Any company that can get me to tell them where I'm at voluntarily has to be doing something right. Apparently I'm a sucker for virtual badges and points. Particularly when I get to compete against my friends.

It's after the show now. Keillor was by turns hilarious, thoughtful, serious and always entertaining. The Mountain Winery, the venue for the show was excellent as well. It's high up on a mountain side in Saratoga California which is southwest of San Jose and overlooks the silicon valley.

My plan for the morning of the 24th is going to be to work on the programming portion of my business idea. I should be able to finish up the initial data gathering portion of my coding with a bit of luck. At that point I'll be able to start working on other aspects of the project.

A minor rant before I go. The Google+ mobile client for iOS has a lot to recommend it. Two things I don't like though are the lack of an HD/iPad version and the fact that it only works in portrait mode. It's the second decade of the 21st century. There is no excuse for a mobile application not to work properly when the device is rotated.

Image by gelund via Flickr