Large amounts of unintended irony in this piece featuring tablet advice from Arrington (<i>red flag</i>) that amounts to "HP should sell large numbers of hardware for low margin".<p>You mean, just like the PC business they're trying to exit? And the console business that can't shoot straight because the era of $60 apps is fading fast?<p>Because you know, Best Buy is super excited to buy tablets from HP for just under $200 and retail them for $200 while being shut out of the app/ad/bandwidth/content ecosystem.<p>To make an ecosystem only strategy work today I think you need to have your own distribution network and HP isn't really in a position to burn bridges with Best Buy over the rounding error that is their tablet business.
I don't think people bought the TouchPads because they wanted a low-quality "couch surfing" device; they bought them because they knew it was an incredible price for the hardware, and with all the media hype happening, they had to buy them before they ran out and then figure out a use for them later.<p>Even <i>I</i> was considering buying one, and I <i>knew</i> I would have played with it for half an hour and then never touched it again.
It seems I'm in the minority here, but I really like what Arrington is saying.<p>People will pay $100-$200 for a dedicated eBook reader. As much as I love my iPad, it does come with a few extra things that one doesn't necessarily need. There's room in the market for a $200 tablet from a consumer point. I have no idea if it makes sense from the manufacturer's point of view, though.<p>That said, this recently created space [cheaper tablets] has started to be dominated by Android tablets. Can webOS find a place there? I don't know. But I think it will have a greater chance of taking on this market than the $500 range overwhelmingly handled by Apple's iPad.<p><i>edit: if they go as cheap as chips and hardware + a little more, they can also have a huge impact on basic tablets used for education, etc. in my dream world, techcrunch somehow licenses webOS and makes the CrunchPad once and for all.</i><p><i>double edit: in the comments someone suggested subsidizing the tablet device to lower its cost and making it up using app sales or a subscription. think game consoles. that would be interesting.</i>
7" Capacitive (Android) tablets are already under $200: <a href="http://s.dealextreme.com/search/capacitive+android+tablet" rel="nofollow">http://s.dealextreme.com/search/capacitive+android+tablet</a><p>These aren't crappy, low powered devices, either. Take this one: <a href="http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-capacitive-screen-android-2-3-tablet-pc-w-wifi-hdmi-otg-3d-acceleration-1-2ghz-4gb-72878" rel="nofollow">http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-capacitive-screen-android-2-3...</a>. It is Android 2.3, 1.2Ghz processor, HDMI out, etc etc. The only weakness is it is WiFi only, but it is only $166.<p>There are still supply constraints around larger 9" & 10" capacitive screens, but 7" screens are getting cheap enough now that it's possible 7" capacitive tablets will drop below $100 by the end of the year (depending on the exchange rate though..)
WebOS is a terrible, flawed, slow as molasses OS.<p>WebOS will <i>never</i> gain traction because apps on it will always be much slower than native compiled apps on iOS or even JITed apps on Android.<p>It's that simple. No amount of buzzword compliance is going to change that.<p>Just look at this benchmark:<p><a href="http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4658/40733.png" rel="nofollow">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4658/40733.png</a><p>The device/OS which relies on JavaScript performance for <i>everything</i> is the slowest when it comes to JavaScript performance. :) Even if they could 2-2.5x performance, it'd still be noticeably slower than iOS or Android.<p>Anyone who thinks people are buying these TouchPads because they think they're a viable product is delusional at best. People are buying them because they're $99, and $99 doesn't buy you much these days.
Fire sales always have a novelty. Its not so much the price point but the innate human desire to pick up things at a price they otherwise could not have afforded or wanted to.
I think that's called Groupon. Taking billions of dollars of investor money and tying it up with no hope of making a single dime. You'll get millions of users and entrench yourself deeper and deeper in a broken business model.
Dear Techcrunch,<p>Android tablets will soon be sub-$200 and will come in any number of form factors, styles and configurations using an OS that actually has a chance of long term support. In fact if all you want is a web browsing device they are there already and have been for a while.
"But one thing I was very right on is the huge demand for a less expensive tablet computer"<p>Arrington should be a futurist/ecomonist, not a op/ed writer -- after all, he was "very right" with this prediction! :-)<p>But, IMHO, I think he was very wrong that Crunchpads would have flown off the shelves. Brand names matter to consumers when it comes to consumer electronics (do you hear anyone talk about the notionink Adam anymore?). You can find a $200 tablet out there if you want to, but I don't see a lot of people looking beyond the brands they already trust for a solution.
The TouchPad will make a great economics case study for price elasticity of demand (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand</a>). I'm sure someone has already worked out a model somewhere.
dumbass.<p><a href="http://arnovatech.com/products/arn_10/index.html?country=us&lang=en" rel="nofollow">http://arnovatech.com/products/arn_10/index.html?country=us&...</a><p>people's ability to refuse to do a 30 second google search before they spout crap continues to amaze me.