Articles about HP

Android's recent success in the tablet market seems to have hit a minor roadblock, as increased competition from RIM's PlayBook and now HP's fire-saled TouchPad chip away at its slice of the pie. Apple seems unaffected for the time being, with its market share increasing quarter-to-quarter.

Apple took a 68.3 percent share in the second quarter, up about 3 percent from the previous period, according to research firm IDC. Android tablet share on the other hand dropped significantly, falling to 26.8 percent from 34 percent in the first quarter.

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One of the nice bonuses of the HP TouchPad is that it comes with a lifetime 50GB cloud storage account from Box for free. This is exactly ten times more storage than they offer standard users on their free tier.

With the sudden discontinuation of the TouchPad and the subsequent liquidation of all stock, this little bonus looks a lot sweeter, but we wondered if Box could pull out of the deal due to behind-the-scenes agreements and arrangements.

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So much for my heaping praise on Best Buy. The retailer has decided to unload its unsold stock of TouchPads after all. It's an atomic blast that will have grave consequences for Best Buy and, more importantly, its other tablet partners. Apple might just laugh all the way to the bank.

The problem is this: Best Buy is sitting on an inventory of as many as 245,000 TouchPads -- or was yesterday. Today, who knows how many there will be for how long. By midday yesterday, cheap TouchPads were sold out pretty much everywhere, except HP online. Today, Best Buy owns TouchPad sales and already has sold out its online stock. Now it's up to retail stores to clear inventory. Last week, my local Best Buy sold the 16GB TouchPad for $499.99. Today it's $99 -- $149 for the 32GB model -- for an attractive 9.7-inch tablet, running the well-reviewed WebOS.

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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.

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