What does the glut of cheap HP TouchPads mean for Apple and Android tablet sales?
If you're trying to get a $99 TouchPad but can't find it anywhere, blame Best Buy. Based on calls placed to a half-dozen of the stores today, Best Buy has refused to sell its huge stock of HP tablets, choosing to return them to HP instead. It's probably cheaper for HP to dump the TouchPads -- as in a landfill -- then to sell them. You can thank Best Buy, which is sitting on an estimated 245,000 units, for that and partly for the mess at HP's online store today.
But there's sense -- loads of it -- for Best Buy shipping back unsold TouchPads rather than putting the soon-to-be obsolete devices into the hands of greedy geeks. HP, which is spending more than $100 million liquidating tablet stock, will compensate Best Buy for inventory. Better to take that cash rather than collapse sales of other tablets and quite possibly create unrealistic expectations among regular shoppers about what tablets should sell for.
Can HP survive Leo Apotheker?
It has been a rough week for Hewlett Packard, which stock took a beating following Thursday’s announcement that the company was rapidly exiting the hardware business, all but killing off WebOS and its associated line of mobile devices, including TouchPad. Within a day, a fifth of the company’s value disappeared on Wall Street.
How much, you say? A staggering $16.2 billion -- some $4 billion more than Google paid for Motorola Mobility. Analysts seem dismayed, and have downgraded the company’s stock. At least one of the credit rating agencies has threatened a downgrade of HP’s debt, and investors seem to doubt the company’s ability to make the switch.
It's a TouchPad Gold Rush!!
To celebrate the launch of BetaNews' latest redesign, we all went on a Cannonball Run for the newly-discounted HP TouchPad, and we found that it truly was a gold rush, and nearly every TouchPad had been scooped up.
Diehards all over the place hit the shops at 8am EST this morning to try to snatch up the super cheap, high quality WebOS tablets from whichever retailers had them in stock, and as it turns out, they weren't exactly lining their birdcages with the things, as some journalists had initially suggested.
Where's the HP TouchPad fire sale?
The InterWebs buzzed last night with excitement about TouchPads selling for $99 and $149 -- that's for the 16GB and 32GB models, respectively. These prices make Border's bankruptcy liquidation look pathetic. Suddenly, TouchPad is the Lamborghini of tablets for 30 year-old VW bug prices. Yeah, but where do you get such a steal? Not where I expected.
Last night, Amazon and Best Buy still offered TouchPad at full retail prices here in the United States. Best Buy Canada, among a handful of other retailers, offered the discount prices yesterday -- that's $300 and $350 off. Today. The WebOS tablet is gone from both US retail Websites, and that's not because they're sold out. I called three East Coast Best Buys this morning and got the same response from all. If they carried TouchPad, it would still be for the higher prices. HP has recalled the tablet, and Best Buy has none to sell.
HP promises WebOS developers an 'updated strategy'
Friday evening, after retailers began showing $99 liquidation prices for the discontinued HP TouchPad, Hewlett-Packard sent a missive to its registered WebOS developers, vaguely outlining the changes that will take place after the company shutters its WebOS hardware division and considers alternatives for the mobile operating system.
Here's the letter in its entirety:
According to Factiva, you could be your company's 'Information Captain'
When you discover an interesting or important article, do you share it with your co-workers and peers? Or are you more the type to read something one of your colleagues shared, and then dig deeper into it to learn more? You could be a "Connector," or a "Miner," according to a new ethnographic study from Dow Jones Factiva.
The study observed the way different individuals in a company search for information and share it with their co-workers, and Dow Jones used the study's data to create six broad psychological profiles based on different user behaviors.
Apple does it again? Doctors Samsung images in court filing?
Apple may have just found itself in hot water again after a dutch technology news site spotted doctored images within a filing in Netherlands court surrounding Samsung's Galaxy S smartphones. The Cupertino company is accusing Samsung of copying the iPhone's design in its line of smartphones, and is seeking an injunction.
Webwereld.nl found that Apple had allegedly doctored the image of a Galaxy S smartphone by compressing it to make it the same height as the iPhone 3G, which Apple claims Samsung lifted the Galaxy S design from. By doing so, it also made the phone wider, which would further exaggerate the similarities.
Did HP do the wrong thing by killing off TouchPad?
HP is taking a beating for its decision to kill off WebOS devices, including TouchPad, and shopping around its PC division, which could be spun off or sold. Shares fell nearly 23 percent -- that's about a six-year low! -- in early trading today.
Betanews readers, who are an opinionated lot, are figuratively shaking their heads in dismay, too.
AT&T executive appears to confirm October iPhone 5 release
AT&T executives are apparently talking up an October release of the iPhone 5, confirming earlier talk that the launch of the next generation phone from Apple would come later than many had initially expected.
AllThingsD was one of the first news outlets to report on an October launch date. No reasoning was given, but it indicated that reports of a two week blackout for employee vacations in late September was not related to the iPhone 5 launch.
Sony unveils 3D HD video binoculars for long-distance lurkers
Sony today debuted two new sets of video binoculars, the DEV-3 and DEV-5, which are capable of 2D and 3D image capture using the new AVCHD 2.0 format.
Though images captured in the original AVCHD standard have shown a slight lack of clarity when compared to HDV because of its 13 to 17 mbps MPEG4-AVC compression in real-world trials; the AVCHD 2.0 standard, which debuted earlier this year, bumps up the maximum system bitrate to 28 Mbps, adds the capacity for 1080p 50i, 1080p 60i, and 3D image capture.
Which Firefox is right for you -- 6, 7, 8 or 9?
The browser market moves at a hectic pace these days, and so while a month ago most people were happily using Firefox 5, Mozilla has released Firefox 6, Firefox 7 beta, Firefox 8 Aurora, and even Firefox 9 via the Nightly channel.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the changes are internal and will make little immediate difference to most people. We ran a few benchmarks on the various builds, for instance, and found Firefox 9 had around a 4 percent lead over Firefox 6, but otherwise the performance of Firefox 7, 8 and 9 proved very similar.
Lost a Windows Registry key? Yaru can recover it
It's no secret that working in the Registry can be dangerous, and the standard Microsoft advice has always been to back up your Registry before you begin. If you're confident in your PC abilities, though, it's tempting not to bother, especially once you realize that most simple editing tasks are entirely safe.
If you don't make a backup, though, the day may come when you really do delete or change something important. And then there's no easy way to reverse the damage; even using a previous system restore point might cause problems with your installed applications.
Viber vies for Skype's free-calling crown
There is no shortage of VoIP apps available for both Android and iOS platforms, but most of them fall down in one of several ways. The first sticking point that can mar an otherwise perfect app is the presence of advertisements. If these are not present it is likely that you will need to purchase credits in order to make call or send messages. Add to this the possibility for an app to just be bad, and any VoIP app vying for attention has to be something pretty special to avoid criticism. Viber falls into this latter category, being as it is, free, well designed, free from advertisements and lacking the requirement to purchase credits.
As a VoIP app, Viber is pretty much what you would expect. It enables you to send text messages and make phone calls using a WiFi or data connection. If you have the app installed on a phone, you can use it to keep in touch with people without racking up a huge bill and without eating into your monthly call and text allowance; if you have it installed on a non-Phone device, you can add phone functionality free of charge.
Nielsen: Most Android apps used sparingly
Apple and Google like to puff out their chest frequently on the number of apps in their respective app stores. But a new study from Nielsen suggests that may be irrelevant.
Android users spend 43 percent of their time on the top 10 apps, and 61 percent on the top 50. This means the over 249,000+ apps that make up the rest of the Android Market are fighting over that remaining 39 percent of user's short attention spans on their mobile phones.
You bought HP TouchPad, it's discontinued, now what?
Six weeks after the first TouchPads reached retail and two months after preorders started, HP killed the tablet. That's right -- in a stunning announcement made just a few hours ago.
What we want to know: Did you buy TouchPad? Are you willing to admit it? What do you plan to do with it? What do you think of HP's decision to ice TouchPad -- your tablet -- in less time than European summer vacations? Please tell us, in comments or email joe at betanews dot com.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.