HP TouchPad Go: $99? 146
redletterdave writes "The HP TouchPad Go, which is a smaller version of the company's signature TouchPad, may go on sale for $99 like its predecessor. The tablet features a 1023 x 768 resolution display, runs on webOS, and also has a removable cover with soft-touch coating to minimize fingerprints on the 7-inch screen. HP's new tablet also comes with a removable battery, 32GB of storage, a 3G radio, a five-megapixel camera and LED flash. HP designed the TouchPad Go around the same time as the larger model, but it failed to reach production stages when the company decided to kill off all devices running on the doomed webOS. If the tablet indeed sells for $99, it would be the cheapest tablet in the world besides the Aakash tablet, which was released by the Indian government for $35."
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I missed the first fire sale, and that's fine because I didn't know about it. I'm pissed off about the Ebay sale, though, because I clicked "Buy it Now" the exact second the sale started (and kept trying for half an hour) and still didn't get a damn thing!
Re:Im in !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a good price/performance tablet was LONG overdue.
Yeah it's amazing what a company can do when it doesn't factor in what it costs to manufacture a product but is simply trying to clear out inventory.
But if you're implying this would be a sustainable business model - you're delusional.
Re:Im in !! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem is everyone is dreaming of iMoney and thus making them overpowered and thus expensive. I mean think about it, what does the typical consumer do with a pad? They check their email, play Angry birds, and watch video. Now the video could be easily taken care of with a broadcom chip which is cheap, especially when you are buying in bulk, I doubt Angry birds is that big of a CPU hog, and email and webpages aren't gonna need much if you disallow flash support.
So I don't see why someone couldn't make a really nice tablet in the $180-$200 price range and make around $10-$15 a unit on them. A dualcore ARM CPU in the 1GHz range isn't that high and resistive will work fine for the screen as long as the OS is tweaked for it instead of just using a vanilla OS unoptimized for the platform like many are doing with android now. So while $100 might not be doable I don't see why sub $200 while still doing the tasks folks want a tablet for couldn't be achieved.
I believe there is something like this already. It's called the Amazon Kindle. Oh, and by the way it's most likely sold at loss. [ibtimes.com]