The HP TouchPad continues to live on as the strangest of 2011's paradoxes, its latest feat being that it managed to sell out completely so fast that the online shopping site eBay could have crashed from the traffic.
At least, this much
was discerned during the short-lived event on Sunday, December 11, 2011.
For those that weren't aware, HP had announced that it would hold a fire sale yesterday, to get rid of some refurbished slates.
The price was of $99, so, naturally, people flocked to it like moths to a flame.
The 16 GB TouchPad was the one that carried that price (74 Euro), while the 32 GB model sold for $149 (109 Euro).
It was quite easy to assume that this all would happen, but there was more than just the super-price behind this event.
For one, HP recently
updated the webOS operating system, just before it announced that the platform
was going completely open source.
As such, while HP will continue to support webOS for a while, other engineers could pick it up once it gets open-sourced.
For a while, owners will still have a rather narrow content collection to enjoy on the thing, but that issue can easily be remedied by modding and hacking.
There are already walkthroughs to
port the Android OS to the TouchPad, and HP itself is no stranger to shipping Android-loaded TouchPads (albeit
unwittingly, somehow).
HP and eBay did try to limit customer orders to two units, but that only applied to a per-listing basis, and with each model listed several times, people could very well have bought multiple ones.
This will let them sell the things on the second hand market at somewhat higher tags, but still far lower than the $400-$500 or more than the device was originally stapled with.
In other words, even if someone missed out on the chance yesterday, they could still find it for sale on other sites.
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