HP TouchPad / WebOS: 28 Day Experiment – Day 14
I had no idea when I started this series of posts two weeks ago, that the events of this weekend around HP and the WebOS would cause this much upheaval. At the end of my last post (Day 11) I came to the conclusion that if the price of the TouchPad dropped to below $200, it was worth buying. I had no idea of what was to come.
By Saturday AM, I awoke to a bunch of emails and tweets (some from you all) alerting me to the fact that some retailers had dropped the price of the 16GB Touch Pad to $99 and the 32GB to $149 here in the US. The race was on! I looked online but found that most sites were already out of stock. There were some rumors that local stores had some in stock and so I headed out to find them. No luck there either! I gave it about an hour of searching and figured the hunt was over. What was there, had already been taken.
What kind of caught me off guard was the intensity and which folks were trying to pick up these deals. When I was in OfficeMax on Saturday morning, 4 guys came in and asked about the TouchPad in the 10 minutes I was in the store trying to check out. There is a Best Buy in the same mall and I could see a hand full of guys milling the parking lot hoping that one would appear. Some of them looked like they had been up half the night and rushed out the door in the morning to search for their game (you know who you are!). Come on guys, you were some of the same folks who believed all the hype when the TouchPad first came out and said you would never buy one. Guess $99 changed your minds?
The dust has settled and it looks like there will continue to be fire sales throughout the next couple of weeks. I just checked the HP.com site and they are officially selling them at $99 but they of course are out of stock. I tried using the feature that would allow me to be notified when more become available, but it didn’t seem to be working right either. It would just hang. Maybe that is an indication of what is going wrong with HP today?
I did find it interesting that when I attempted to sign up for the notification that let me know they were selling them again, I got this form. Notice the text on the bottom.
Redirected to the palm.com website? What does that mean? When I go to palm.com it redirects me to http://www.hpwebos.com/us/ which has a like that says “Notify Me When Available” that just redirects you back to the HP site. I’m sure this is driving some folks crazy!
I think I will hold on to this TouchPad for the remainder of the evaluation just to see what will happen. If I find one for $99, I may jump on it. Very worth it for the price. I will continue to post my finding every couple of days. If you have things you would like me to test, look at or comment on, just email me at podcast@theaverageguy.tv. With 100,000 new owners out there now, a few of you should have some questions.
Jim Collison is a blogger and podcaster for TheAverageGuy.tv and the HomeServerShow.com and a Microsoft Windows Home Server MVP
This unit was provided by Forsythe Technologies in Omaha NE for review purposes.
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Update 8/21/2001
Found this while I was hunting for some $99 TouchPads. What, did the demand get that high?
