HP slashes iPad-competing TouchPad price to $399 1 month after release - Page 2

Somehow, I do not think HP shareholders will find that an acceptable reason for failure.

I'm not sure I disagree, but in terms of "what their problem is," I would point more to their stifling corporate culture (a la Microsoft), and their ponderous glacial pace in an industry where everything can change overnight. HP's idea of getting a product to market "fast" is "within a year or two."

They killed the market leading iPaq in exactly the same way.

WebOS would be doing much better at the moment if HP hadn't introduced a year and a half delay after buying Palm only to come to market with the exact same devices but with "HP" on the side. I'm sure there are people at HP with excellent and interesting plans for WebOS, but they just can't execute from within the slow-moving behemoth that is HP.

EXACTLY!

iOS did have stale parts, and with each release, Apple has addressed them (the last release finally fixing the awful notification system).

There is very little that is "stale" now. However, I do believe the next step Apple needs to take is a "DashBoard" for iOS. They have taken a small step towards this with the weather app, etc on the notification screen, but they need to open it to 3rd party devs.

Also, they now need better inter-app communication. That is another part that is stale.

Its really sad when people complain about iOS being stale, and then point out the grid of icons, which means they are completely missing the point of iOS, which is that it serves as a vehicle to deliver great apps, which can convert your 3" device, or your 10" device into any possible product.

I think the product is excellent and far better than the crapfest that is Android. It's HP the company that's the problem. They have a history of knifing their own babies in the cradle.

If only someone else had bought Palm.

Still ... if Android becomes patent encumbered enough and doesn't actually start to show signs of beating iOS, people may turn to a third alternative and WebOS *is* the best alternative. It might come down to a battle between Microsoft and HP for second place if Android moves out of the picture which would be interesting.

Microsoft has a crap product, but has a history of convincing people to pay huge amounts of cash for said crap. HP has an excellent product, but a history of not being able to convince anyone to buy anything.

Oh, they absolutely will. We already have extra widgets in the Notification Center on jailbroken versions of iOS 5, and that wouldn't be possible without an allowance for the frameworks to do that sort of thing by Apple.

Apple's secret weapon was the iTunes Music Store. An ecosystem is a big deal these days.

While you could technically use an iPod with only ripped CDs you've purchased.... the iTunes store went on to become the largest music store in the world.

You can't do much outside of web browsing on the TouchPad since there aren't many apps. And there probably won't be a huge line of cases, docks and cradles either.

As good as WebOS on the TouchPad is.... it will likely be a dead-end product.

Acer tried this with notebooks. We all know how this ended up - Acer stock plummeting, the CEO kicked off.

It keeps being said. It's not a tablet market, it's and iPad market. Just like the iPod.

BS. You've obviously never used WebOS to know what you're talking about. Android and iOS are basically the same thing, with Microsoft and HP having an actually unique experience (never dealt with QNX to comment on that one).

I agree, and HP has the further problem that it isn't patient with products that don't sell enough, quickly enough. Worst case, Touchpad could be gone fairly soon.

Out of the 3 operating systems I'm obviousy in the iOS camp, but I'm slightly interested in the future of WebOS. Android reminds me of too many other half-assed Linux solutions and the fragmentation just makes it look like a series of cheap iPad knock-offs (which they essentially are).

WebOS has a history behind it as a touch based OS. HP is trying some new things; I welcome it really.

Spot on. Despite people's (perhaps legitimate) complaints about iTunes becoming bloated, it's still the best thing out there.

I hope the new ecosystem -- iCloud -- is implemented as well (and no one from the dotmac/me.com had anything at all to do with it).

Now that's nice. Customers can tell friends how they made a smart purchasing decision by dropping $399 on a "first attempt."

Maybe they should rename it to woof.com or bowser.com

So, what, are they now aiming to be Number 2+ instead of Number1+?

ANY tablet that is noticeably thicker and heavier than the iPad 2 is simply DOA in the market. all of them, including the TouchPad. only Samsung has been smart enough to realize that so far.

and except for rich guys and website techies, the gadget-loving early-adopter market for not-Apple tablets - which isn't that big anyway - is all tapped out. they've all bought one of these V.1 dogs of some kind by now and are stuck with it for a while. they will wait for the next generation of models/OS next year that presumably will be much better - and they have enough cash again to buy another.

HP and the others are competing in the tablet market, which is a niche market and they will do ok in it. Unfortunately they are unable to complete in the iPad market which is what the public want.

Do you watch The Office?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-...e_gdata_player

How long did it take Apple to drop the price of the original iPhone? There was no competitive product on the market at the time. And the economy was much more robust than today.

To be fair, Apple was trying to create a new market and carrier relationship where nothing similar had existed before.

But, one wonders what would have happened if Apple had not been agile enough to....

Finally, I think the quick discount of a recently introduced competitive product -- indicates the product cannot stand on its own, e.g. it is not competitive.

I can't agree with this. I think they should work under lock qnd key until have a refinded rev 1 product not a "it's pretty good for a non-iPad tablet." is market is young and Apple is trying to make it who iPod-like monopoly. If you release clearly inferior products you aren't going to get a solid hold of the market as we can now infer from their profit slashing price cuts.

Never seen it (remember, I'm an old fart) -- but that was funny... voof!

Now $299 at Staples! That is an awesome deal. Considering getting one and I already have an iPad!

Yes, but it took Apple a decade to get OS X to where it is now. And the personal computing landscape 11 years ago was vastly different than the post-PC era is now.

In late 2000, when the Mac OS X Public Beta was rolled out, the personal computing market was already mature. Windows ME and Windows 2000 were Microsoft's brand new OSes. Microsoft had locked in the corporate IT world and had thwarted IBM's OS/2 and Netscape.

And what has changed since then? We've seen OS X gradually increase in robustness and popularity within the Mac community. The recently added Mac App Store and the iOS-like features in Lion appear to be speeding up OS X's evolution.

And Microsoft's last real improvement in their OS line up was putting the NT kernel into their consumer OS. The result was XP, released in 2001, which is still good enough for many people. XP still has larger market share than Vista or WIndows 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...rating_systems).

So now Rubinstein is name-dropping "OS X" to hype webOS. Well, times have changed. It's the post-PC era and things are moving very fast. It's a vast uncharted frontier, and there's a mad land rush among hardware and software vendors. All trying to stake a claim.

Apple has a huge advantage. They are able to leverage the last decade of infrastructure work. They've progressed from iTunes (Rip. Mix. Burn.) to iPod to iTunes Music Store to iTunes Store (with videos, movies, and TV shows) to iPhone to App Store to iPad. And they have evolved Mac OS X into iOS. In many ways, iOS is the lean, mean next-generation of OS X. (And we'll be seeing more and more iOS features migrating into OS X in the future.)

Apple has already built their post-PC infrastructure. The railroad tracks heading into the vast new frontier. Everyone else is on foot.

I still remember this from the interview with Palm CEO (interviewed by Peter Kafka from AllThingsD):

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked Id peed on his rug. Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product he asked, then walked away.

Wow! Maybe after the weekend the prices will drop further as sales have been slow...

I was in OfficeMax the other day, and they had a display for the HP TouchPad. I asked if they had any display models so I could try it. They didn't. They only sold them, they didn't show them. This may or may not be a good thing for them. Without an operating display model, it seems they would certainly lose sales. If they had a working display, they might at least have some people who try it and buy it. At least Costco had a display unit for the Xoom. I tried it, but the interface was a mess. It's no surprise to me that they don't sell well. But at least they took the chance.

I have an iPad 2, so I'm biased.

Got a link?

I just checked and it was $499 less $100 discount.

http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/04/t...99-99-weekend/

Should have added the link, sorry. The $299 price comes from a Staples discount added to the HP discount, which I guess sounds a little iffy. Hopefully they redeem both discounts.

It works like nothing else, but looks like an iPad. Maybe they should've made it work like an iPad and look like something else.

This made my Friday - ty!

Yeah, but this thing is laggy? Like, why is it using old slow chips and commanding a high price point? And why is it less responsive than an ipad 1? And why is it more fickle with gestures?

Anyone else actually play with one of these? Most of the android tablets are also kinda slow with their transition animations, but some of the software is at least nice. These and the playbook just kinda seemed meh. I had high hopes for the playbook but it really underwhelmed in person. The gestures were NOT intuitive and NOT responsive.

No... Next step: Wood Shed!

Touch Pad getting Spanked!...
/
/
/

They have the copying down pat. Right down to the way Steve answers questions and the way he reacts.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work when you're WRONG.

Referencing, of course, Steve post-introduction of iTunes version 1 where, when talking to a developer of a competing (then-better) software about song ratings, Steve said something to the effect of, "Why would anyone want to rate their music? Anyway, we'll have that in the next version." and ended the conversation.

HP Products are good, but not Apple good.

I would rather have a Touchpad to a playbook. I would rather have a playbook to an Android mongrel machine. At the end of the day, I go for an iPad over all of them - which I have.

I believe the Touchpad is like Harry Potter in the Philosopher's Stone - it's good but not quite fully developed its abilities.

The Playbook is like Dobby, it's good, dependable but I'd keep it in my house.

The mongrel android tablets - muggles.

But we all know at the end of the day what the Dumbledore machine is

totally apologise for the Harry Potter reference, but I like to keep it simple for the Americans :-) ;-)

Just teasing folks ;-)

Having HP drive WebOS successfully in the tablet segment does more to slow the advances of Android tablet than it hurts Apple's iPad share. Until the whole segment can be seen, we still don't know how big the tablet market really is, unless you see Apple iPad as the full extent of the segment, which it isn't. What there is of the "tablet" market is really only the iPad segment (which is why some pundits are claiming its only an iPad market). A small percentage of buyers will be either passively or actively "anti-Apple" and they will add either Android, WebOS Win7/8 or QNX to the mix. Apple coming first to market with this form factor and ecosystem provides the benchmarks that become the consumer expectations for the device, no matter who makes it.

The consumer market breaks down roughly into these segments: innovators (always first to own any given new device) - 2.5%, early adopters (rely on initial impressions of the innovators to decide) - 13.5%, early majority (rely on the innovators and early adopters to lead the way) - 34%, late majority (wait until many others are buying them) - 34%, laggards (luddites, etc) - 16%, mass market success relies on 15-18% of market penetration, which is why Apple so successfully drove iPods, iPhones and now iPads. The rest have to differentiate and prove themselves against the early iPad benchmarks to drive market acceptance.

Apparently, it's still a mediocre product but now avaiable at a lower price...

We're beyond merely competing on the tablet level with specs. Come Sept/Oct it's going to be about how many supporting services are coming in the deal.

Not only will every tablet have to offer close enough performance/quality to the iPad but they will have to match the services as well.

The battle lines are drawn. As a consumer will you move to the bland and ubiquitous web based functionality that Google and others provide or do you want better crafted native applications that offer unparalleled sync and backup offerings?

iThink *hehe* that failing to look at the entire picture and relishing in saving a few bucks is pennywise pound foolish.

Has it sunk in at HP that the Palm buyout was not such a good idea?

Sorcerer's Stone. Yes, America is the center of the Universe