Dixons drops exclusive Toshiba Android tablet

Dixons stores this weekend began charging a bonkers £999 for Toshiba's £329 Folio 100 Android tablet, apparently in an attempt to dissuade punters from buying the product. The reason? According to a snap of Dixons' internal EPoS system, Eclipse: "Due to very high return rates, we are temporarily stopping sales of [the Toshiba …

[Geoff Campbell]

Ah, interesting.

I had some hilarious conversations with PC World staff on Friday as they tried to justify the £999.99 price tag. None of them tried the "It's crap and we don't want to sell any" line, curiously.

I also had a very amusing discussion with a phone shop droid (I forget which chain, sadly), when I wandered in quite keen to buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab. He decided to try and switch-sell me an iPad instead, and got quite offensive when I suggested that this wasn't what I wanted, and perhaps he'd like to talk to me about the Tab instead. So I left, with my credit card completely unsullied by them. Bloody idiots.

GJC

[Anonymous Coward]

> Phone shop droid

These people are little more than stock room monkeys and, were it not for the fact that most of the population is as illiterate as them (in multiple ways), these chains would be made aware of the level of sales they lose and these staff would be out on their collective ears.

Hmm, collective ears... interesting concept.

I choose the grenade icon, for fun daydream of yelling "Fire in the hold!" as I roll it into the local branch of stock room monkeys and scramble for cover.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

"Fire in the hold!"

Hole.

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Fire in the hold!"

Time to upgrade my sound card & speakers?

[ThomH]

This is the real reason for Internet shopping?

At least for electricals. It's absurd that someone can walk into a phone shop and ask for a product that is available subsidised on mobile phone networks, then be unable to obtain that product rather than a similar one they don't want that isn't available subsidised.

Still, the £999.99 possibly saved you an error?

[Geoff Campbell]

@ThomH

Good grief, I wasn't going to actually buy one! Everything I've seen about them makes me think that even at £329 they are over-priced, and much better examples of the breed will be along at around that price soon enough.

Actually, I was sniffing around the Galaxy Tab in there, watching the price. It went from £499 on Thursday, to £489 on Friday, and then intriguingly dropped another tenner in the time it took me to drive from Cardiff to Carmarthen (about 90 minutes, tops). And now it has dropped to £469, I believe. At this rate, it'll be free by Christmas.

I notice that Amazon currently have no stock, by the way, so it looks like they are selling well.

GJC

[ThomH]

@Geoff Campbell

That's really odd. Though maybe Dixons are like the phone shop you attempted, and have come to the conclusion that they need to drop the price because sales are lower than expected — never mind that it's only because every time someone tries to buy one some sales idiot obstructs them. Which obviously isn't the case on Amazon.

[Geoff Campbell]

@ThomH

Yes, indeed - I suspect they tried it at £499, then found everyone was buying from Amazon at £469, so they are gradually trying to find the right level before Christmas, without dropping so low they don't make a profit. I wonder how much they pay for them wholesale?

GJC

[studentrights]

AppleTV is out selling the Galaxy Tab

Price drops this soon indicate poor sales. The word on the street is that Samsung is slashing production in half. Amazon not having any also means little. How many did they have in the first place?

Did you realize that AppleTV is out selling the Galaxy Tab? What does that tell you?

Apple TV now listed as #12 on Amazon’s ‘Best-Selling Gadgets’ list

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/27453/

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm

"Did you realize that AppleTV is out selling the Galaxy Tab? What does that tell you?"

mmmm .... nothing?

[Geoff Campbell]

What on earth does the Apple TV have to do with anything?

It's a completely different class of product, at a completely different price point. There is absolutely no overlap whatsoever.

It's quite likely that Jaffa Cakes are outselling the Apple TV, but I find it difficult to draw any sane conclusions from that fact.

GJC

[Steve Todd]

@TomH

Two blindingly obvious errors there. Firstly neither the iPad nor the Galaxy tab are subsidised in the UK (there may be a small subsidy from some providers for the Galaxy, but not much). Secondly phone shops get paid a bounty for signing people up on contract. They'd MUCH rather flog you a handset on contract because of this.

Generally if a salesman won't sell you something it's because he doesn't have any, or occasionally because he has sales targets to meet in something else.

[Anton Ivanov]

Excellent

I guess now is the time to look for a bargain basement discounted one.

It is one of the next gen tablet devices that can actually run a proper linux distro instead of being crippled with running a selection of Java-that-is-not-Java.

http://tosh-ac100.wetpaint.com/page/Overview

My only gripe with it so far has been the price. There is no way in hell I am paying 376.00 for a slate even if it does what I want. I'd rather suffer from trying to fight with Linux for one of the pseudo-tablets that the second tier vendors have produced.

[Anonymous Coward]

How many lemons have Tosh got at the moment?

Specifically, what's the relationship between the article above, and this somewhat unhappy review from a few days ago:

http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/

[Rogerborg]

Shades of Lunix netbooks

For a while they had both Lunix and XP versions of Acer Aspires, and the salesweasels were desperate to steer punters away from Lunix because (tacitly) they were getting so many returns.

Not because they didn't work, just because they didn't work the way Joe Winluser *expected* them to work.

So I wonder if this is product fail, or expectation fail. They're flogging them as iPad alternatives, when they're really just glorified iPACs (yeah, remember those, before iApple iOwned iEverything?). How could you not be disappointed at the lack of iMagic?

[Geoff Campbell]

Reliability is certainly a problem

In the same PC World store, their demonstrator was locked up solid a few days ago, so there are definitely some problems specific to the Folio.

GJC

[flameresistant]

Surprising ...

Toshiba is a pretty reputable manufacturer so this comes as a surprise. It will be interesting to see if they fix the issues or just pull the product altogether.

it would seem that it is not as easy to build a useful and competitively priced tablet as you might think.

Anyone bought a Galaxy tab yet? Be interesting to see what people think of them after using them in anger for a while.

[Geoff Campbell]

Galaxy Tab

A colleague bought one on Friday, and still loves it this morning, which is a good sign. I'm holding off for a little while, as I suspect they will come down in price after Christmas, or possibly even before that, and I don't have a need for one before then.

GJC

[LuMan]

This is a good thing!

The more that the whole of the DSG chain do to prevent people from spending money with them only goes to improve the shopping experience for all shoppers.

[Annihilator]

Price went up

I know a few people who would be more inclined to buy it now that it's expensive - probably in a "SATA can make your audio sound better" kinda way...

[Sooty]

hmm, surely

increasing the price to £999 will just make the customers who do buy them far unhappier. Buying a piece of crud for £329 would make me slightly miffed, for £999 though...

[Manu T]

Perhaps for the better

Perhaps it's for the better. I personally see no real use for a tablet. Never did, I admit that the first generation (the socalled tablet PC where you could turn to screen to cover the keyboard) IMHO looked much more value for money than the current crop/crap. I do believe in computerphones or as you will.. smartphones, though they became increasingly less smart over the years. It's unfortunate that modern phones can do less then devices 4 years ago not to mention their shoddy build quality. My old SE K750 had only one real flaw (it's youstick cursor control) while my current Samsung has been in repair twice already and last week I got a phonecall from the repair company that Dynafix hadn't repaired the bloody thing at all. They just returned to sender with a note (cannot be repaired). I've yet to find out why stores sell 500 € electronics with 2 year warranty and can't repair the bloody things when after 1 year. In any case. Needles to say it's my last Samsung device EVER!

A pitty that Toshiba who's otherwise known for decent quality stuff is also becoming a crappy manufacturer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Raised the price to stop sales

I would have thought an Active flag would have been a good idea...

[[Yamthief]]

In my opinion...

Having used one of these devices, I'm positive the issues are solely software based. I removed a few bits of Toshiba Bloat-ware from the startup list and replaced Toshiba's Launcher with ADW.Launcher and the device became totally useable.

The other issue I'm sure people are returning the device for is it's initial lack of Flash 10.1. It is to my understanding that the official release from Toshiba Towers for the Flash plugin is some time this week, maybe even as soon as today.

[Frederick Tennant]

Missing flash

Missing flash or requiring updates is one of the reasons why apple don't have flash on their pads

[James Hughes 1]

Drops

Isnt the headline here, well, completley incorrect? They haven't dropped it, as you said in the article itself. Just made the price prohibitive whilst they wait for some fixes.

[alexh2o]

Yeah Right...

So of course this has everything to do with "problems" and nothing what so ever to do with their cheap marketing tricks!

Sell it for a week at £999. Then the next week, just before Xmas, the price is "Better than half price £329.99".

As its been on sale at £999 for a week, they are legally allowed to advertise the 'new' price as a reduction!

[Spanners]

Task Killer

I wonder if it is like the stupid "Task Killers" that some phone providers are now insisting on installing on their phones.

What happens with them is that the Killer decides to close some tasks, then the operating system sees that things it wants to use are closed and reopens them and it just gets into a loop.

For non-*NIX types out there, just imagine Windows Task Manager closing down programmes randomly. If you are lucky, you will slow down, but you may just find that things stop working randomly until the task restarts. At least proper operating systems do this. ?Does Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesco?

Tesco seems to be giving alternative format tablets a bit of shelf space...

http://direct.tesco.com/content/specials/samsungtab2010.aspx

http://direct.tesco.com/content/specials/dell-streak.aspx

[Tigra 07]

No Tit Required

"and the price has been increased to £999 on Eclipse to prevent further sales"

Here's a wacky idea, how about just taking them off the shelves for a bit?

I'd be pretty pissed off to buy a £300 brick, but very pissed off to buy a £999.99 brick

[The Starglider]

It doesn't work that way...

@Tigra07 - the company can quarantine an item from sale, but for stock control the company needs to have the item available on the system. It's pretty standard practice for a company like DSG to increase the price of something to make the staff aware that the item is not for sale.

Go to a store when there is a huge release of a game or some new big thing due, like a day before release. I bet you'll find that the item is on the system, but at a really high price in order to both prevent early sales and to inform other staff of this.

[Tigra 07]

RE: Starglider

"but for stock control the company needs to have the item available on the system."

That doesn't mean they need to keep them on show though.

There's nothing wrong with putting them in the stock room and still keeping them showing in stock.

[ijs]

I sent mine back

I had lots of problems with mine and took it back within hours of purchasing it. I thought the one in the store had just been messed around with in terms of the lack of response, but after purchasing one I found out how wrong I was.

Problem 1.

Unit just stopped responding. You would press, press, press the icon and sometimes it work. Its supposed to have a decent processor but it just ignored my key presses at times.

The Samsung did not suffer the same problem.

Problem 2.

No diary. The unit would sync to gmail or to my corporate calendar but there wasn't an application to get access to this either included or downloadable from the Tosh store. Given this is a fairly standard feature on a smart phone and all other Android devices why leave it out?

Problem 3

Despite toshiba claiming it has flash. The sticker on the box stated it would be available at somepoint in the future. In other words no flash. I appreciate the ipad does not have flash but at least it works with respect to the other problems i experienced with the Toshiba.

From having one, its clear Toshiba wanted to rush this out and have the customer beta test the unit. This is unacceptable and I would love to know the reason for Dixons effectively pulling the product.

[Robert Lougher]

Works well, if you wipe Android

I've had a Toshiba AC100 for 10 days, and I'm very pleased with it. The difference is that I wiped Android off of it as soon as I got it and replaced it with Linux (Ubuntu 10.10). I don't know so much about the Folio, but definately for the AC100 Android is totally unsuitable. Linux, however, works OK*, and it makes a nice little portable development system. So it's a case of nice hardware, shame about the software.

* Information on installing Ubuntu can be found at the link below (although I did not follow them exactly). Currently, sound is not working.

http://tosh-ac100.wetpaint.com/page/Ubuntu

[A 31]

DSG fornever

just in case some idiot wants to pay 999 .... let's get the money of''em anyway

aaah DSG , what a lovely mentality you have, not only you treat your employees like crap, but your customers too ! at least am sure someone in managmeent treats themselves nicely :D