John Leyden at the Register only has to write two stories a day - Paul Hales
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Best Buy is sitting on 200,000 HP Touchpads
US ELECTRONICS RETAILER Best Buy is sitting on a stack of 200,000 HP Touchpads and wants to send them back to the maker of expensive printer ink.
According to Allthingsd, Best Buy stocked its warehouses with around 270,000 HP Touchpad tablets. However, the retailer has been unable to flog the devices and has sold at most 25,000, even with a $100 discount, so it has asked HP to take back all of the unsold tablets.
In fact, things are so bad that HP EVP Todd Bradley might have to go to Best Buy's headquarters and plead with executives to be patient.
The Touchpad is suffering from poor sales in US retail stores, with Wal-Mart also thought to be unhappy.
Last week, HP slashed the prices of its WebOS Touchpads in the US, cutting the 16GB Touchpad price to $450 and the 32GB version to $550.
At the moment UK retailers are still sticking to the £399 price tag for the 16GB Touchpad, while a retailer at Amazon is offering a 32GB Touchpad for £422, though most other places price the 32GB unit up around £480.
When The INQUIRER played around with the Touchpad last month we liked its performance but baulked at its relatively meagre application catalogue and physical characteristics. However, users are reporting improvements to WebOS since HP released an over-the-air update on 1 August. µ
Tags: Hardware
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It is being reported that the demo machines in-store were running buggy beta software (that on the actual sale machines was better), and that the store staff have not been trained on how to use webOS so to avoid embarrassment they simply pointed people at iPads, which they knew how to use.
The thing is, printers don't need demonstrators or sales staff, and people pretty much understand what laptops do already. HP needs to learn from the days when Macs didn't sell because the sales staff didn't know how to demonstrate them and the in-store screen display was rubbish. Apple nearly died then...but returned from the dead in a big way.
I agree entirely that the Mk 1 Touchpad looks sick technically compared to the iPad2 (it is basically a souped-up iPad 1, after all) or the Asus Transformer. However, the HP price cut made things look even more desperate.
They should perhaps now give the Mk. 1 away to company IT departments and software developers, and explain how easy it is to roll out in house applications.
Tablets are toys. Not much you can do on them except browse and read email.
They have no real processing power. People don't want Tablets, they want iPADs. It's about the brand, not about the content.
That's where the Android tablets are selling, and the market is glutted with those too.
All things pad are not created equal. A pad is a terrible thing to waste. And what have we learned HP?
Apple buyers are NOT reasonable (and probably parents are buying), so thinking that the rest of us will pay $500 for similar hardware is faulty.
Fanboys even brag: I Paid Apple Dearly.
HP is big enough that they could have cut price way down to gain market share. Still can, but time is running out, and the economy ain't going up. I'd say $200 is a fair price for the minimum version.
When I first saw the spec and price of Touchpad I knew it will be dead-on-arrival.
But even though HP decided to gamble. It's sad to see a well designed OS encased in the wrong body. Hope HP learned from this.