

After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP - karteek
http://blog.palm.com/palm/2011/08/6-pack.html

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jeffclark
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 editor, a WebKit browser and the
inspection pane - the same one built into Chrome/Safari/Whathaveyou.

It'd be a shame to see WebOS completely die off.

~~~
barkingcat
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?

~~~
jeffclark
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.

~~~
barkingcat
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.

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r00fus
To me, this smacks of Palm just continuing executing in spite of Corporate's
(ie, Apotheker's) decisive move.

Good for Palm.

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dustyreagan
You have to put a credit card on file to use the promocodes. So, they've just
made it much easier for users to impulsively buy other apps in the future, and
they've shown people how to use the app store. Not a bad marketing plan!

Personally I planned on making zero webOS app purchases in anticipation of
installing Android. But now that my CC is on file, I'll probably have Angry
Birds on here by the end of the month. :p

~~~
conradev
Angry Birds is free ;P

~~~
dustyreagan
Oh! Nice! I may be able to stick to my plan after all then! :)

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

~~~
wccrawford
Of course it is. The question is: Will it work?

~~~
mattmiller
They got me. The touchpad is pretty cool.

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conradev
"Eligibility Requirements: US-based HP employees, HP reseller partners, HP
customers and HP webOS developer partners are eligible to use these App Promo
codes. Promo participants require a TouchPad with a current functioning user
profile; with credit card purchasing enabled. The promo codes below will
expire on August 31, 2011 at 11:59 PM. Promo codes are available for as long
as inventories last."

The codes are invalid, it seems that, according to the last sentence, the
inventory has run out. Why HP, why?

~~~
watty
Because they just wanted you to enter your credit card information!

~~~
conradev
I already had mine entered >_>

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angryasian
received message that promo codes were no longer valid because of exceeded
usage.

sent from HP Touchpad

~~~
watty
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!

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

~~~
rbanffy
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.

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Raphael
"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...](http://allthingsd.com/20110822/how-much-did-hp-
lose-on-the-touchpad-heres-a-good-guess/)

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

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brackin
Wow, 6 apps!

