HP’s recently defunct tablet has sold out as consumers lined up, waited and stampeded stores trying to get their hands on the dramatically reduced product.
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The tablet was discounted by roughly 80%, with the base model dropping down from $499 to just $98 within four days of its Australian launch.
With the price dropping fast, people were stampeding Harvey Norman stores who had exclusive rights to the tablet’s launch. Within four days, Harvey Norman’s General Manager for Computers Ben McIntosh, estimated 1,100 TouchPad tablets were sold, but when the price tumbled down to $98, the remaining thousands were cleared out by end of trading.
According to McIntosh, HP said it could allocate a “few hundred” TouchPads for Harvey’s online store, but HP themselves had sold out by 5pm.
McIntosh told the SMH he hoped to get more stock by overnight air freight, but it would now be impossible since US BestBuy sold more than 200,000 tablets over the weekend,
“There are none [left] unfortunately. I thought there might have been some more available but BestBuy in the States sold a massive amount over the past week so literally HP’s got none,” he said.
Price USA, an online middleman for US transactions has hit twitter in response to a myriad of TouchPad requests, pleading “please, please, please no more orders for HP tablets.”
The flailing webOS tablet has cultivated large online support, with users campaigning for a version of Android’s Honeycomb that will work with its hardware. Website Hcknmod.com is offering a $1500 reward to whoever can adopt the software first.
Read: TouchDroid? HP TouchPad To Run Android
Some buyers who were lucky enough to snatch a TouchPad have turned into investors selling the tablet on eBay with a 100 per cent mark up, with the retailing $149 32GB model being sold for $300.
Despite the below cost price cut, McIntosh said the TouchPad losses will be passed onto Hewlett Packard, but chose not to reveal how much the loss was worth.
