I Review Electronics

Last month HP announced a massive price drop on their HP Touchpad tablet. This created madness that created a Black Friday-like atmosphere around retailers who had the item in stock. One day, nobody wanted one. The next, everyone was trying to nab one. The lucky ones nabbed the 16 GB model for just $99.99. Quite the drastic drop from its original $499.99 retail value.

The reason why HP canned the HP Touchpad was due to low sales. These low sales were because this tablet should have never been priced at $499.99. That’s what the Apple iPad 2 and the Samsung Galaxy cost. Those came with iOS and Android, respectively. The HP Touchpad had the app-less webOS. What the frenzied sales showed was, if anything, that HP didn’t create an inferior product, it just priced it wrong.

The price drop of the HP Touchpad will have a few aftershocks. It will make the HP Touchpad the best selling tablet of 2011, bypassing the iPad 2 and the Samsung Galaxy. Albeit at the cost of losing millions of dollars. But at least it’s one year of toppling the tablet giants.

The HP price drop also created a market for webOS. One of the reasons why the HP Touchpad didn’t sell well was because of a lack of app support. Developers created apps for Apple and for Android, but not for HP. The webOS operating system just didn’t have enough people using it. Well that all has changed now hasn’t it? HP will now license out webOS to other companies to use on their devices. That is where HP will make their money now.

While HP will not make a profit on any of its HP Touchpads, it will however benefit from the sale of accessories. Some accessories sell for upwards of 50 and 60 dollars. Some users may have opted to get insurance on the product. And yet others may enjoy their HP Touchpads so much they could just buy an HP laptop next. Those users who love the webOS operating system may end up buying a phone or tablet in the future that comes with webOS too. So while it seems that HP was lost its mind and acted like they were giving a disneyland ticket away, there may indeed be a method to this madness.