TouchPad sales doubled after it was discontinued Hewlett-Packard doubled its fondleslab shipments after revealing plans to ditch them and more importantly gutting the price. Channel analyst Context says HP TouchPad flogged nearly 31,000 devices across the UK, Germany and France in August – twice the amount in July – after a very slow start to the month and confirmation mid- …
Havn't looked back - amazing piece of kit, and I love WebOs. What I think this proves is that tablets will take off, when price/performace reaches the level that the at-a-loss touchpad reached. At the moment they're a preimium device, when they become a commodity, things will change.
I bought a touchpad in the recent fire sale...
I wouldn't say it was a dud, but it was certainly overpriced given that its a newcomer to a market dominated by Apple... Had the touchpad been cheap from the start, not as cheap as it ended up but somewhere in between it could have sold reasonably well, and higher sales would have translated into developer interest and thus more apps.
The hardware itself is perfectly decent, and WebOS seems fine... From a geek perspective its also the easiest tablet OS to get a root shell on.
HP should have sold it not at a loss, but at a break even price in order to establish a place in the market, and provided incentives for developers to port their applications. Given that the touchpad runs linux, it could also have been made easier to port or directly run android applications.
It seems that Motorola are following suit, the price of the Xoom seems to be dropping every day lately... I would buy one, but with the frequent price drops i don't want to run the risk of buying it today and it costing half as much tomorrow.
Why discourage reselling? Poor sods will probably be out of a job soon the way the company is being mismanaged; let them make a few bob from HP while they can.
You could even call it market research - something the HP marketeers or bean counters have obviously not troubled themselves with (a bit 20th century, don't you know) - establishing the optimum price beyond which the general public aren't prepared to buy one.
If HP had done that themselves, they might not now be covered in cack.
Have an el-cheapo e-book reader (Kobo, I think) that we use for the same stuff - IMDB is probably the home page! Why spend $4-500 when you can get most of the same functionality for $100.
Still wish I'd been able to snaffle a TouchPad for that price - I was hoping to use my old Palm applications on WebOS, but $500 was way too much. I can still get a (boxed) Tungsten E2 on EBay for about $250.
I keep saying this, but it bothers me every time, so I keep saying it:
> "The flash sale created a huge surge in demand," said Salman Chaudhry
The sale did not probably CREATE that much demand.
The demand for a $99 tablet is already in place, but usually there is zero supply at that price level, so we see zero sales.
When they lowered the price, demand wasn't CREATED. Rather, existing demand was MET.
Now that the product is gone, there is still a high demand for a decent tablet for $99, so when the next copycat company gives up and decides to cut their price, again, demand won't be CREATED, it will be MET.
>The demand for a $99 tablet is already in place, but usually there is zero supply at that price level, so we see zero sales.When they lowered the price, demand wasn't CREATED. Rather, existing demand was MET.<
Not necessarily! I recently "tried" to buy a game that I only had passing interest in because of two reasons. 1. The buzz surrounding it. 2.The 1st day price drop made it worth trying.If I liked it then it was a great buy. If I didn't then it didn't matter as the price point meant that I still got good value out of it.
Lots of people look at tablets and think "Oooh, shiny". I include myself in this. What they don't think is "Oooh, shiny, and worth 500 quid" because they don't (yet?) see them as an essential piece of kit.
Drop the price of what seems like a quality tablet into the impulse purchase zone and of course you're going to get sales.
one thing this did show was how many dodgy retailers there are out there. Taking money from a customer for a product you don't know if you have in stock / you don't have in stock / you cannot guarantee when it will be in stock should be illegal, and is a something only the most untrustworthy/dodgy sellers & shops practice!
Probably regret mentioning this, but I also doubt my chances of getting down to a CPW shop in time so doesn't really matter.
My local shop phoned to let me know that the 'Large' CPW shops are expecting very limited stock in the next couple of days (count that as from the date of this post).
I'll be phoning my nearest 'Large' store first thing tomorrow morning to see what they say (they will all probably be knobbled by the staff, I bet).
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