HP is Planning an OTA Update for the TouchPad

"Over the last few weeks, we've seen the TouchPad discontinued because it was so unpopular and then sell-out because the demand for the tablet was so high. "

What are your thoughts-
At $500, they could barely sell the Touchpad and at $99 they sold a couple hundred thousand in under 48 hours.

Wouldn't you figure that at $199 they probably still would have sold out, but maybe in a week, instead of 2 days? So, figuring 500k units that is $50M right now or $100M over a week. At $299, maybe it would have taken a month to sellout; $50M now or $150M over the next month?

I would love to know what their actual cost is for the TouchPads.

Still say this is a marketing ploy.. They will reenter the market with a better tablet but keep the price low to conquer the market quickly.. If you have money and you have a tablet you need to bring into the market its the best way..

you know that recent quake demo on that creditcard sized pc?

well... this is a 23 year old talking, and i despise smartphones, phones, and in general, any tech that is realy a step backwards.

but the screens on these things cost how much to make? 30-50$
the pc credit card thing will cost how much? 25-35$
a simple touch screen that requires pressure costs how much to implement?
and lets throw in a 3mp camera and a small web cam for the hell of it.

lets say all this, and a battery that lasts, i don't know, 2 hours unplugged, but came with a car adapter, and a charger, and an external battery system

im pretty sure the price of said machine would probably be under 100$ for a 4ich screen, and probably about 150 for a 10 inch tablet.

you could sell them for a base price of probably 120$ for the 4 inch, and 150-200 for the tablet size, and still pull in proffit.

make your own os, and make it low profile, and there you go. a device that is a guaranteed win.

Actual cost or bill of materials I think I saw was about $218 but don't quote me.

At least they are not abandoning the ship mid-sea. So kudos to them for the upgrade plans.

@Jerky_san

actually if they had learned anything from this it would be not to re-enter the market with a better product, it should be to re-enter the market with a reasonable product thats much cheaper, it doesn't have to be cutting edge hardware, it only needs to be powerful enough for general purpose (the majority of stuff you will be doing on a tablet does not require an ubber CPU), make the profit margin on the damn thing infinitesimally small, establish a major share of the market, even if you only made $10 profit on the cheap tablet if you shift boat loads of them that's still big money $10 x 25 million (approx number of iPads sold to date) = $250 million, once you managed to marginalized the competition, release a premier edition of your product with better hardware spec and higher profit margin

IMHO there is only 2 markets for tablets, a big market for cheap disposable limited function tablet devices and a much smaller market for premier tablet device that has the fully functioning capabilities of a laptop, if you corner the first market the second one should be a walk in the park

http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/N [...] rials.aspx

Bill of materials is 318$. They can't afford to sell lower than 350~$ at the very minimum with barely any profit margin after considering shipping + assembling.

Well if they sold them for $399.00 at least it would have been a lower cost alternative and they could have tried to make the profit on the apps. But when they priced it the same as an Ipad it was DOA.

I wonder how many where bought just to sell on Ebay

__-_-_-__, you're also a douche

@Pat:

I doubt that is an accurate number, we can only guess since HP ain't gunna give out proprietary info like that. I doubt that the wholesale cost is 318$ seriously, it doesn't make sense since HP buys GOBs of parts which can drastically lower the costs just as with shipping and transport they have volume on their side so I would bet it is much much lower, I'm sure it is not MORE than 150$ at the very most.

If they sell the thing for $320 or so they would still be making a profit, BUT they MUST SELL volumes to be profitable, but they can easily do this.

HP unknowingly did something no other company could have ever dreamed of, What they can capitalize on now is simple. The cost of components, assembly, packaging this and that etc. Cost is around 260 dollars. I would sell them for the cost if HP really wants to conquer the market. Increase the volume of users and then the developers don't care how much the price of a tablet is. For them the only important thing is the volume of the user base so that they can sell their app. after that get a cut for 30 percent and slowly make money from those cuts. In 5 years all tablet manufacturares will be out of business if they still stick to their current model period.

HP is being better than expected in keeping support and updates alive for the TouchPad.

The cost in parts is $328 for the 32GB and around $12 less for the 16GB version, then there is the construction costs, and all the money that went into developing the thing, purchase of the OS... Good luck getting a similarly specc'd tablet for less than $300.