In a bit of surprising news, Hewlett-Packard released their Q3 2011 financial results today, along with the announcement they are going to “discontinue operations for webOS devices.”
Which means this is the death of their newly released HP TouchPad. They did say they “will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward”.
What led to this decision? Possibly the poor sales of the TouchPad in the first place. It seemed every where I turned they were making another announcement about a sale on the TouchPad. After looking at the reviews, I was seriously considering purchasing one, but I guess I’ll keep shopping around.
Best Buy had very dismal sales and reportedly couldn’t get rid of their inventory of TouchPads. One writer called it the OuchPad. Ouch.
There’s also the fact that E-Reader ownership is larger than that of the tablet. Both e-readers and tablets have seen growth over the last 6 months, but e-readers numbers are larger.
What are your thoughts on this news and why do you think sales on the TouchPad were so awful?
Some people are snatching them up in dozens from Walmart B&M 16gb and 32gb for $129 and $149 respectively :
http://www.fatdeals.net/showthread.php?t=1703&p=1789&viewfull=1#post1789 OD offers them periodically and, allegedly HP small business still sells them at the old price but you can contact to get a price adjustment There’s also talk of porting android to this thing, that would be huge.
Currently, FatDeals.net is showing a link to eBay where you can buy the 16gb model!
I don’t know, but there was a huge line at Best Buy yesterday for people to buy them at significant discounts!!!
I think what i really like from Touch Pad is definitely the US of webOS. It looks pretty good for mobile device. There also have been many talks that some of webOS US has been “used” on Apple’s latest iOS 7. And that is the Task Manager UI. However, I’m glad HP has already made a brave decision to jump to Android platform with their newest tablets. I just hope that their tablets will do great on the market given that i’m a huge fan of HP laptops. I also heard that HP will also make smartphones too in the future. Well. let’s see when it comes to fruition.