Kurt Keville wrote: > Well, I guess some people got one before eBay crashed...
An article on the sell-out: http://mobile.informationweek.com/80269/show/8a673c635b426cedd5c1b96973a365f6&t=mdil5fv4gjjs847mb58eeslgc0 Only those with a hair-trigger finger were able to score HP's $99 and $149 TouchPad tablets, which went on sale at 7 p.m. (ET) Sunday evening on eBay. The cheaper 16-GB model (mostly refurbished units) was scooped up within minutes... ...the sale lasted all of 25 minutes... ...the total is rather pathetic. eBay shows that 2,316 of the $99 16-GB TouchPads and 5,534 of the $149 32-GB models were sold. That's a total of just 7,850 units. (You may remember that HP held a firesale for the TouchPad back in August. Demand for the TouchPad at $99 was so much that HP ordered another production run.) Huh? Is that accurate? Why would you build *more* of a product that you know you are going to sell at a substantial loss? They did use them around black Friday as a sweetener if you bought an HP desktop or laptop. You still had to pay the $99. I guess from that perspective they could charge the loss to the marketing budget of the PCs and still make a profit on the PC sale. Buyers acted so feverishly Sunday that eBay's website ran very slow during the sale. PayPal crumbled under the strain, firing off error messages when it was unable to complete transactions. I would think eBay has faced bigger draws than TouchPads. Out of curiosity I took a look to see if the HP eBay store had any of these a bit before 7 PM and then again around 8 or 9 PM. There was no sign that they ever existed...(no pre-sale announcement and no post-sale "sorry we sold out"). I'm not too disappointed. I likely wouldn't have bought one anyway. I'm not convinced they're worth the bother even at $100, unless the as-delivered product did everything you wanted from a tablet. Or you planned to become a WebOS open source developer. Android tablets seem to be clustering around a few price points: $100 - Coby, Pandigital - e-readers at best $200 - Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and a slew of first-gen tablets hanging around as old stock, refurbs, or used. $300 - Acer, Asus, and Motorola models from last Winter. $400+ - Current models. and every 6 to 12 months everything slides down a step. It won't be long before you can get TouchPad-equivalent hardware loaded with Android for $100. From a hardware hacker perspective, what interests me is what useful things can you do with say a $50 Coby e-reader? A cheap color touch-screen with WiFi should open up lots of possibilities. For example, a home automation "console" that's cheap enough to put into most of your rooms. A replacement for your thermostat? Security camera monitor? Virtual window? Information appliance (weather, etc.). Much like widgets on your desktop. Will there be tools to quickly throw together custom UIs on them, perhaps like this: http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/03/android-design-preview-simplifies-app-mockups-developers-lives/ or maybe just using a web UI is the way to go, if they have a usable web browser. I'm waiting to see what interesting products slide down to the $200 range in the next 6 months. I'm looking to replace my 5" automotive GPS appliance (an orphaned Motorola) with a 7" Android tablet. Assuming I can find a navigation app I like. Just imposing the restriction that it needs to work from locally stored data instead of pulling everything from the Internet rules out most nav apps. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
