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After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

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Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#21

Post by jeffclark »

barkingcat wrote: post #17
jeffclark wrote: post #7

It's strange. $99 firesale, new TouchPads in the hands of a bunch of nerds, show off some "good" (not not "great") apps by giving them away. I kinda hope it's all marketing hype. But now I want decent, functioning apps for this thing. I created a legit WebOS app for myself in about 30 minutes. The development of these apps are unbelievably quick since it's just HTML/CSS/JS. Your entire dev environment is a text edito…

Did you create your app before or after you heard about HP killing the platform off? If it was after, what made you not develop any apps when the platform was viable? This would be a great postmortem question for the HP team - if they had such a compelling development platform, why didn't anyone want to make the effort before they killed the entire thing?

After.

The only reason I didn't create one before was because I didn't think the platform had enough users to make the ROI on learning how to program for WebOS worth it.

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#22

Post by [deleted] »

watty wrote: post #18
angryasian wrote: post #9

received message that promo codes were no longer valid because of exceeded usage. sent from HP Touchpad

same - I was really excited about Sparkle and Big Boss. Apparently they've been dead since last night. They succeeded in getting me to put in my credit card info too!

[deleted]

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#23

Post by badkins »

watty wrote: post #18
angryasian wrote: post #9

received message that promo codes were no longer valid because of exceeded usage. sent from HP Touchpad

same - I was really excited about Sparkle and Big Boss. Apparently they've been dead since last night. They succeeded in getting me to put in my credit card info too!

I got these last night. Sparkle and big boss are lame, but I'm not a fan of touchscreen games. Glimpse is the best of the pack. The camera app sounds like a good idea, but is really useless except for taking a picture of yourself.

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#24

Post by barkingcat »

jeffclark wrote: post #21
barkingcat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you create your app before or after you heard about HP killing the platform off? If it was after, what made you not develop any apps when the platform was viable? This would be a great postmortem question for the HP team - if they had such a compelling development platform, why didn't anyone want to make the effort before they killed the entire thing?

After. The only reason I didn't create one before was because I didn't think the platform had enough users to make the ROI on learning how to program for WebOS worth it.

So now that you know how easy it is to learn to program for webos (html / css/ js) - would the # of users it takes to make the ROI be reduced by enough such that it's ok to sell to an extremely small market?

ie. Since it's so easy to develop for, you will spend very little time/effort/money to learn to develop vs the iphone (which involves apis, objective c, etc) or vs the android (which involves java, etc) - and so it's ok that the market is small, because you can sell less copies to recoup the investment outlay (which was smaller to begin with because of the ease of development).

Does that change the value proposition of the touchpad?

If it does, then this points to a marketing failure on HP's part - they had a perfectly fine product - just needed to get past the initial "knowledge gap" when no one knows anything about the product.

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#25

Post by notatoad »

mattmiller wrote: post #2

A part of me thinks that this is whole thing is a marketing gimmick to create a bunch of touchpad fans.

not to create touchpad fans, the touchpad is dead. it's about creating webos fans. what they're doing with the firesale and now with the apps is increasing the value of the platform so they can sell or license it for a higher price

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#26

Post by gravitronic »

angryasian wrote: post #9

received message that promo codes were no longer valid because of exceeded usage. sent from HP Touchpad

Reminds me of a similar let down when a certain tablet computer was sold at a ridiculously low price and quickly became impossible to obtain...

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#28

Post by Raphael »

rbanffy wrote: post #14
diminish wrote: post #8

i am curious now how much share this firesale gives the touchpad got in q3 2011.

Quick guess: Best Buy had 270,000 unsold units. Assuming they have 10% of all the market, there would be now 2.7 million Touchpads out there. All Pre 3 inventory in Europe will get sold the same way.

"HP’s initial order from its Taiwanese contract manufacturer, Compal, was for between 500,000 and one million units." http://allthingsd.com/20110822/how-much-did-hp-lose-on-the-t...

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#29

Post by sliverstorm »

notatoad wrote: post #25
mattmiller wrote: post #2

A part of me thinks that this is whole thing is a marketing gimmick to create a bunch of touchpad fans.

not to create touchpad fans, the touchpad is dead. it's about creating webos fans. what they're doing with the firesale and now with the apps is increasing the value of the platform so they can sell or license it for a higher price

That's a rather clever salvage plan. I would not have thought to try that.

Re: After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP

#30

Post by rbanffy »

Raphael wrote: post #28
rbanffy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick guess: Best Buy had 270,000 unsold units. Assuming they have 10% of all the market, there would be now 2.7 million Touchpads out there. All Pre 3 inventory in Europe will get sold the same way.

"HP’s initial order from its Taiwanese contract manufacturer, Compal, was for between 500,000 and one million units." http://allthingsd.com/20110822/how-much-did-hp-lose-on-the-t...

So, best buy had more than 50% of the lot? That's surprising.
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