HP earlier said that it would be building and releasing a new run of TouchPads,
its soon-to-be late, but perhaps not too lamented webOS tablets, but
did not say exactly when, although it said it would be sometime in HP's
fiscal Q4 2011, which ends October 31.
With an announcement that the
TouchPad will be returning to its EPP, can that new set of TouchPads be
far away?
According to employees who have been sent an email by Stephen Dewitt,
Stephen DeWitt, SVP & GM of HP webOS global business unit PSG
(Personal Systems Group), the company will release a final batch of HP
TouchPads to employees starting September 28th at 9:00 a.m. PDT. The
pricing for the tablets will be the same as the fire sale prices ($99
for 16GB, $149 for 32GB) that spurred the demand that HP wanted at its
original prices.
TouchPads will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, with
only one TouchPad per employee (not one of each storage tier). Orders
may take as long as 10 days to ship due to warehouse load. Orders will
only be taken via the online EPP store, no phone orders.
One might expect that a number of these will end up on eBay. A number
of TouchPads are selling on the online auction site for $200 instead of
the $99 fire sale price for the 16GB model, meaning a 100 percent
profit for a seller who managed to get one at the low, low price.
Although HP's earlier statement indicates that regular consumers
should be able to get their own opportunity at the next run of
TouchPads, it's unclear if that set of devices is already spoken for by
those who managed to get unfulfilled orders in at the fire sale prices.
That said, we would recommend that folks start looking closely at
sites such as HP's online store, Best Buy and Amazon.com in the days
just prior to and just following Sept. 28.
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