HP Fire-Sales the TouchPad for $99 and $149, Exits the Tablet Market
HP will be dropping the price of their TouchPad tablet to $99 for the 16GB version and $149 for the 32GB version. This after a complete failure of sales and multiple distributing companies looking to return hundreds of thousands of units. Aside from the shocking price, HP has announced they will be refocusing their company away from the mobile market. HP will still make laptops, but will no longer utilize WebOS, which was acquired when they purchased Palm for 1.2 Billion USD last April.
Best Buy in Canada already has the product marked down on their website, and it is expected to roll out their US website later today. As of this moment, HP’s website does not reflect the change in price, but we will bring an update to this article as major retailers update their pricing.
Update:
Walmart, Best Buy, and most of the other major electronics retailers have reflected the heavily discounted prices on the tablets on their websites. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have any in stock. There are a number of physical stores that may still have them, but whether they have received the news of the manufactures markdown is unknown. Most stores will not be price-matching them as the change has not reached them. Also bear in mind, they would be losing quite a bit of money if they sell the TouchPads for $400 less than the retail price., Major retailers like Walmart and Best Buy have begun (or have already completed) massive returns on the abandoned tablet. We’ll likely see masses of complaints of people beyond their return policy who purchased the Touchpad for the original value. HP has created quite a fiasco with the massive price drop.
