OK, this is getting kind of ridiculous. Remember when HP said last August that it would make a final production run of its canceled TouchPad tablets in order to fulfill tthe demand for the device? Then HP sent out an email to the people who signed up for TouchPad sales updates, claiming that HP didn"t have any more TouchPads to sell. It now turns out that isn"t true after all.
HP"s WebOS Developer Device Program is now selling the 32 GB version of the TouchPad for a limited time but only to registered members of the WebOS developer community. The price is still at $149.99, the fire sale price that was set back in mid-August when HP discontinued the TouchPad.
This certainly doesn"t seem to be very fair to the many regular consumers who were hoping to get their hands on the TouchPad without having to buy anything else in some kind of bundle deal, like Best Buy and TigerDirect.com have done. HP is telling consumers one thing while telling its WebOS developers something else entirely and that"s never good on the public relations front.
If there are any executives at HP reading this, there are a lot of folks who want to get the TouchPad and you promised them a couple of months ago they would get their chance to buy a copy in the final production run. Instead, you back track on that promise but at the same time you give your WebOS developers a way to get TouchPad units. It"s not fair at all and we hope that you might reconsider this move.