Remember when I said I thought HP was telegraphing its sales with the TouchPad pricing? And how I said the device is $100 off this weekend? Well either HP is not selling any TouchPads at all ever or they’re on some Quixotic race to the bottom in relation to every other tablet out there. You see, the TouchPad is $379 on Woot this morning.
I love Woot. Best shopping site ever. But Woot (generally) is where gadgets go to die. It’s where you can get a $99 smartphone that the rest of the world didn’t want or a failed manufacturing experiment that no one wanted to buy. It’s not always that way (Wine.Woot, for example, is just the opposite of what I described: a finely curated, clever site for great wine), but it’s often that way.
That said, clearly Woot has some pull and for HP to put their gear on there is a big deal. But I worry that this move will induce a slow and steady erosion of WebOS sales figures. Leave it to HP to lead us all into another netbook rathole, cheapening the mobile computing experience until it collapses under it’s failure to add value.
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