Since the HP TouchPad is going for such a low price, you might be tempted to buy one. The most popular locations for finding the $99 TouchPad are Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart and Barnes & Noble. You might have better luck finding a unit in stock by springing for the $149 32gb TouchPad.
Just to recap what you’re getting with the HP TouchPad:
- A 9.7” screen with 1,024 x 768 resolution.
- A tablet with good contrast, brightness and viewing angles inside and outside which allows sharing the tablet with friends.
- Decent CPU. The HP TouchPad runs on a 1.2GHz Snapdragon chip with 1GB of RAM. The operating system is WebOS 3.0 which supports pinch to zoom functionality popularized by the iPhone and iPad.
The Drawbacks of the TouchPad
- The TouchPad is unable to create or edit MS Office documents right out of the box. It does ship with QuickOffice pre-installed, but that offers read-only views with no full editing.
- There are no aps for it. Sure, $99 is cheap, but if you’re only getting a web browser and email reader because of its limitations, it’s too much money for too little of a computer.
- There’s no rear-facing camera, which means you can’t use the screen as a giant viewfinder. You do get an 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera that can be used with the Skype video chat application.
- There is no way to purchase video on demand (streaming movies and television shows) on the TouchPad.
- The hardware in general is underwhelming when compared to the (thinner and lighter) Apple iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Browsing the web on the HP TouchPad is decent, playing online video has been a problem for some users but this should be fixed on most units by now with firmware upgrades. Battery life promoted by HP is 9 hours, which is basically on par with the Galaxy Tab and the iPad 2.
The shortage of apps is a problem, no doubt, but that will change with time. They are already looking to port Android to the Touchpad: Hack N Mod offers $1500 bounty for HP TouchPad Android port. But some think Android will be even worse, and honestly, Android can’t be considered a mature operating system since it too lacks apps.
The Best Strategy – Wait until people get sick of it, and pick it up on eBay.Since there are going to be a huge number of people buying these tablets over the next week, a large minority of them either going to get sick of it and the TouchPad’s lack of apps or aren’t going to want to hack the system to load Android’s Honeycomb OS onto it (if and when it comes out).
This means there’s going to be a glut of them on eBay. There are over 3,000 units available on eBay as of today, but these are sellers looking to bank on the feeding frenzy. Wait a few weeks, and there should be plenty available from those who have buyer’s remorse.
