HP TouchPad is a brick: Android, $99 price tag can’t save it

by Bill Palmer

Think the HP TouchPad is a bargain at $99? It’s easy to come to that conclusion, with the tablet selling for a fifth as much as iPad 2 rival. But here are ten reasons why the TouchPad is a brick, and why it isn’t worth (any) price tag:

- Lost amid the hype is the fact that the TouchPad is a discontinued product. There’s a reason why no one wanted one until after HP killed it and started giving remaining units away at below cost.

- There are almost no apps for the TouchPad, and there won’t be any developed in the future.

- Rather than running the easy-as-pie iOS interface of the iPad, or even the nasty-but-familiar-if-you-use-an-Android-phone interface of Android based tablets, the HP TouchPad runs something called webOS. It’s aimed at geeks and has no place in the hands of mainstream users. Also, webOS has been discontinued, meaning no future software updates for it either.

- HP has killed off its entire tablet division, meaning no TouchPad support beyond what the company is legally required to give you.

- Even trying to get tech support from fellow TouchPad users will be tough going forward, because there are so stunningly few of them; this product was discontinued after a mere seven weeks.

- You won’t be able to find more than a scant handful of accessories for the TouchPad, as it didn’t stick around long enough for accessory makers to get involved.

- The claims that you’ll be able to run Android on the TouchPad are probably total nonsense. Even if the small hacker group attempting to pull this off manages to succeed, they won’t be able to support it. Android is wild-west hacker platform to begin with, and now you’ll be running it on hardware it was never meant to run on.

- If this is your first tablet, the TouchPad is a nightmarish way to get your feet wet with this new kind of computing: crappy interface, no apps, no support, no fellow users. Start off on this wrong foot and you may ruin your ability to ever trust any future tablet. If a $99 TouchPad is all you can afford, you might be better off simply waiting until you can afford a real iPad in the future and starting your tablet experience at that time than trying to cut corners now with a fake iPad.

- The TouchPad may not even be safe to use. The lack of updates also includes security updates, meaning there will be no one around to plug the security holes which arise in your operating system. It would just be a matter of time before your TouchPad becomes a virus-infested mess and there’s literally nothing that can be done about it.

- Most cheerleading TouchPad stories conveniently manage to skip over this particular detail, so we’ll repeat it here: this is a discontinued product. Buying a discontinued car or dishwasher would be one thing. Buying a tablet computer that’s been killed off by the company which makes it? You might as well just take a hundred dollar bill and set it on fire. At least you’d get more entertainment value out of the latter. Here’s more on the death of the HP TouchPad.