How I got a $99 HP TouchPad tablet and why I bought it

The bottom line is that I get the impression that HP has a clear and present opportunity to leverage this glut of TouchPad sales into legitimate relevance for webOS — the only question is whether it cares to do so. If not, the TouchPad stands to go down the trail blazed by the Nook Color: a well-built, highly capable Android tablet on the cheap, assuming the community can manage to get a stable Android firmware put together. And when have they ever failed to do that?

What’s a TouchPad worth, anyway?

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“A good tablet at $99 is more attractive to me than a wonderful tablet at $499.” – Pat D.

Most respondents were frank about the fact that the TouchPad’s clearance $99.99 / $149.99 price structure actually fell below the maximum price that they would’ve paid. The median price buyers gave me worked out to $224.50, which splits nicely between $199.99 for the 16GB model and $249.99 for the 32GB. Some said it would be worth more to them — as high as $400, for a couple folks — with the knowledge that the platform would continue to be actively supported.

Several buyers pointed out to me that even though the TouchPad isn’t necessarily as nice or usable as an iPad, it’s light years beyond the $100 Android tablets widely available at drug stores and bargain outlets. As TmoNews‘ David puts it, “This isn’t a Walgreens style tablet where my expectations for a $99 tablet will be met with $99 quality.”

So, did HP leave money on the table? My best guess is that they did, yes — at least $50 per unit, if not more. At $150 to $250, they may not have caused the same level of mass hysteria over a 48-hour period, but I have little doubt they still would’ve been able to sell through inventory in a reasonable amount of time.

The billion-dollar question

“That’s Amazon Kindle money and you get the second best tablet on the market.” – Jon H.

Should (and could) the TouchPad have launched at a too-good-to-pass-up price? As I mentioned before, the idea is right out of the game console manufacturers’ playbooks: for the first year or two, HP would eat some extraordinary cost per unit — several hundred dollars, perhaps — in an effort to build and lock in a legitimate webOS ecosystem by any means necessary. A brutal game, yes, but a game that a select few (HP included) could likely afford to play.

Several respondents mentioned that it’s difficult to recommend a $500 iPad 2 against a $100 TouchPad, just as it’s virtually impossible to recommend a $500 TouchPad against a $500 iPad 2. At some point, the scale tips. Not everyone will agree, of course — if you’ve budgeted $500 for a tablet and you just want the best tablet that your money can buy, you’d still be comfortable spending the money for the iPad 2 and you probably wouldn’t look back.

This isn’t a zero-sum game, though. Three-quarters of buyers I spoke to said they would’ve bought a TouchPad just as quickly if it had launched for $99.99/$149.99 — in other words, if this was a permanent price, not a clearance — and another one in five said they would’ve eventually bought one. As I’ve said, my sample set falls on the geeky side, but everyone knows HP, and I have no doubt that they could’ve come up with a clever marketing campaign focused on the fact that they were undercutting Apple by hundreds of dollars for a similarly-equipped tablet. Even if they’d only won a fraction of would-be iPad 2 buyers with the campaign, they would’ve attracted legions of folks who simply can’t justify spending half a grand on a non-essential gadget.

“I’m confused as to why they didn’t at least ride it out through the back to school and holiday season.” – Lewis B.

And thus would begin the virtuous cycle: users lead to developers, which lead to apps, which lead to users. The tablet market would presumably be larger overall, and HP would’ve owned a chunk of it. Granted, that chunk would’ve come at a monumental operating cost, but right now, tablet vendors urgently need to be thinking in terms of generational platform leadership — just as Windows’ dominance today grew out of a seed planted by MS-DOS, PCs, and PC clones over a quarter century ago.

And I would argue that webOS is on that very, very short list of platforms with enough promise to deserve that kind of no-holds-barred approach to building market share. Most of my respondents were of the opinion that the TouchPad is worth $99.99 on its hardware merits alone, but — in a market utterly dominated by iOS — nearly half still want to give webOS a shot. By any definition, that works out to a potential user base worth serving.

This article was orignally published on Thisismynext.com — “The $99.99 TouchPad phenomenon, in your words.”

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