The last HP TouchPad order processed before website crashed...

[infinix]

This is on the Small & Medium Business portal of HP. With HP trying to ditch the TouchPad like it is radioactive, the website was flooded with orders. The consumer side sold out, but the small business side, as a result of a glitch, continued to show having product available. As a result, people kept trying to buy from there and basically crashed the whole order system.

This is a screen shot of the lat valid order processed by the website. The dumb thing is that the order number appears to be on a single digit increment system. You can scroll through as many orders as you want by adding and subtracting one. Well, in this case, just keep subtracting from this order number, because there isn't anything beyond it. And don't worry, you don't get to modify the order whatsoever. It is a read-only page.

 

[Tom Hendricks]

I was thinking about picking one up, with the fire sale. I own an iPad, but since news of this I have been curious.

 

[Mr.AtoZ]

I bought one but returned it on Saturday. Luckily I got my money back with no problems. It is not a bad device but certainly pales in comparison to the iPad when viewed side-by-side. Even at a discounted price you will be faced with an uncertainty about future support for the hardware and especially the software. The CEO of HP declared that they will license their OS to third party vendors as they no doubt need to recoup their investment any way they can. Licensing will probably be very cheap. It will be a good entry point for small companies having difficulty competing with development for the iPad. But by that same token it leaves you wondering just how good the future devices supporting WebOS will be. I for one do not see much merit in it.

This whole thing is a major black eye on the face of HP. What a dysfunctional organization. They wanted to get into the tablet market now that Apple proved it profitable. But did they bother to consider how crowded it was becoming and that the HP brand did not have enough muscle to make a huge impact? Their market research teams probably felt tremendous pressure for HP to participate in the tablet arena when prudence would have suggested otherwise. Very sad to see HP slip down another rung.

 

[Mooch]

I was thinking about picking one up, with the fire sale. I own an iPad, but since news of this I have been curious.

I wouldn't bother...it's like a plastic, suckier copy of an iPad. We got a demo unit from HP at work a few weeks ago.

 

[Stone_Cold_Sisko]

i got one and for 99 bucks I love it. the web browsing experience alone is really solid, Flash works really well in it. You can natively use Youtube, Hulu, Grooveshark, etc without needing apps.

It helps though that I am a techie. One of the first things I did was do the jailbreak equivalent (installed "preware") and immediately downloaded several tweaks and utilities. I'm going to try and overclocking the processor tonight.

I'd never buy a tablet for 400 bucks though. Tablets to me are basically glorified light browsing toys. I had an iPad (from work) for a while and barely used it, I kept getting frustrated and going over to my laptop to do 'real work.' If I didn't have a smartphone, maybe, but between iPhone and laptop, the iPad just wouldn't get "400 dollars worth" of use out of it.

I don't suggest the cheap Touchpad for people who aren't techies though. I can handle the upcoming lack of HP support and apps, because I'll just check in with the homebrow folks, maybe watch the progress of porting Android to it, etc etc, and don't really need apps since I find tablet computing in general to be too limiting. This is basically become a device for "tech hobbyiests"