HP TouchPad gets a $100 price drop

1. A cool little fact is that it is selling for $399 in Australia too. We finally got a WebOS device in the country and miraculously it did not have a 200% mark-up as per usual.

   Personally I can’t pull the trigger on it because I generally don’t like tablets because I like to be productive and the form-factor doesn’t allow productivity. Perhaps if there is a nice keyboard that could be attached like the ThinkPad tablet or the EeePad Transformer it could twist my arm.

2. Awesome, this is about where the Tablet should have been positioned in the first place.  Now lets see if enough sell to attract developers to webOS 2.x

   1. Not sure how much sales of a webOS 3 device will help attract developers to webOS 2, but I suppose it’s possible.

3. It will be interesting to see if Samsung follows suit now with the Galaxy Tab.  I was going to say the same with the Motorola Xoom but I guess they don’t have a 16gb model.

4. Waiting for all the “This just shows they can’t compete with Apple” comments.

   1. Why?

      1. Probably thinks this is a different tech blog. 🙂

         I do think that one of the best ways for companies to compete with Apple is typically by competing on price. Apple has typically charged premium prices for high quality products, ceding the market for budget devices to other companies.

         But that’s changed a lot in recent years. While the MacBook Air isn’t exactly cheap, it’s not ridiculously priced for an ultraportable laptop with its specs. And the iPad isn’t exactly an impulse buy at $500, but it’s not wildly overpriced for what you get. 

         I think a lot of device makers were hoping that Apple would charge $700 or more for the iPad so they could undercut the price at $500. When that didn’t happen Motorola, Samsung, HP, and others tried matching the iPad’s price while Acer, Asus and others simply started out with lower prices. 

         1. I’d agree with every point of that assessment.

            I’d also say that it’s hard to compete with the iPad 2, with a all black glossy plastic tablet with a slightly dimmer screen.  Holding one in hand it just doesn’t feel as polished as a iPad 2, so it was hard to physically see anything that justified the price.  

            At $400 they’re competing against the Icona and Transformer, which are both nice devices, but each has tradeoffs and flaws, so the competition is on a more even footing.

            We’ll see.  It’s going to be interesting to see how these sell.  Creating a webOS app isn’t particularly hard, but as far as I know none of the application tool sets that allow code written once to be compiled for either iOS or Android work on it, so it’s non-trivial port existing apps to the platform (which is to say it’s not overly hard, but you can’t do it with a few configuration changes and the press of a button either).

            When I first bought a Pre I didn’t think the lack of apps was a big deal.  It turns out that it increasingly became one as time wore on.  So I’m a little gun shy, and without a user base to get developers to develop apps, which then get more users, HP still has the chicken and the egg problems that Palm had.

            Still this is relatively good news.  At least HP is willing to slash profits to get the platform into users hands.  That’s a good sign to me.

            1. PhoneGap allows development for multiple platforms.  Read the Logitech case study though.  It points out that there can end up being cross platform parts that are incompatible.  As they say, these can be handled via plug in, but still…

               Regards,

               Hans

         2. “Probably thinks this is a different tech blog. :)”

            I could have done without that.

            Like “Someone”, I agree with most of your assessment, but I’m not so sure about the other device makers’ hoping Apple would charge $700 for the iPad, since many of them — and very clearly HP — didn’t start developing their tablets until after the first gen iPad was already out. They knew the price points. I suspect a major explanation of the pricing is that the companies who want to appear serious to the business users are leery of budget pricing out of the gate. Acer and Asus aren’t aiming for business users. HP and Motorola clearly are.

            1. Sorry, didn’t mean it as an insult. But while tech blogs in general tend to attract Apple fanboys, I’ve noticed Liliputing doesn’t. I’ve rarely, if ever seen the kind of comments you alluded to here.

               As for the price… HP was actually working on tablets before the company acquired Palm. Originally the HP Slate 500 Windows 7 tablet looked like it was going to be a consumer product, but ultimately HP decided to released it as a premium device aimed at enterprise users.

            2. True enough, Liliputing attracts more Notion Ink fanboys than Apple ones. If there are any Notion Ink fanboys left around. 😉

               As to your second point, Asus had tablets out as well, albeit what people used to mean by “tablet computer” — laptop with touch-enabled swivel display. Not sure about Acer. But HP’s Slate 500 and the older Asus tablets run full-blown OSes, attempting to be a laptop replacement by running normal desktop/laptop applications. They weren’t what everyone started doing after iPad: low-power blown up mobile devices running stripped-down smartphone OSes, with a focus on smartphoneish mobile “apps”, media consumption, and long battery life. Two different ballgames, at least for the time being. I’m sure they’ll converge in a few years.

      2. One has to be able to derive some small amount of amusement from the incessant fanboyism surrounding these tablets to be able to stomach following the news about them. And Apple has the fannyest fanboys. “Fannyest”? Did I just say that?

Comments are closed.