HP TouchPad a fifth of iPad 3 price tag, but iOS 5 delivers iPayoff

Look hard enough, and you just might be able to get your hands on one of the remaining fabled $99 HP TouchPad units. That’s one fifth the price of the current iPad 2 or the upcoming iPad 3, both soon to be powered by Apple’s iOS 5. Fail to find a sub-$100 TouchPad and you can pick one up at auction for two or three hundred dollars instead, still comfortably cheaper than any tablet Apple offers. Yet there are valid reasons to pay the full $499 for an iPad anyway. Straight from the “you get what you pay for (or sometimes far less)” category, here are five reasons the iPad 3 (or if you can’t wait, the iPad 2) is worth anteing up for rather than the uber-cheap TouchPad.

App Store: The third party app market for the TouchPad never materialized before HP killed off the product. There are a handful of apps, but they’re hit or miss, and it’s unlikely they’ll continue to be updated or any additional apps will emerge now that the TouchPad is officially a goner. Contrast that with the hundreds of thousands of apps, most of them free, available for the iPad 2 and the upcoming iPad 3…

iOS vs webOS: The iPad 3 will run iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s touchscreen operating system. A year from now, the iPad 3 will also run iOS 6 which comes after that, a free update which will breathe new life into your tablet. In between, security updates and bug fixes will arrive with regularity and as needed. Contrast that with the TouchPad, which runs webOS. HP is done developing it. There will be no future versions from the company (despite the bizarre claims from TouchPad fanatics that webOS is still somehow secretly in development in an underground bunker). There’s talk that rival tablet maker HTC could buy webOS for its own use. Even if true, HTC would be developing future versions of webOS for its own hardware, not for existing TouchPad users. In other words, a year from now, your TouchPad will be running exactly what it’s running today. If security issues of flaws arise in the mean time, you’re out of luck…

Accessories: Just as the app market never really materialized for the TouchPad, the accessory market didn’t either. Cases which fit will be hard enough to come by, let alone higher level accessories and peripherals. In contrast, iPad 2 cases are sold on every street corner as will iPad 3 cases. There are also high level iPad accessories ranging from custom-fit keyboard docks to rotating docking stereo systems.

Ease of use: Palm originally developed webOS as a for the geeks, by the geeks operating system. Witness the fact that geeks universally praised webOS as being ideal, even as the mainstream rejected webOS so thoroughly that it forced Palm out of business. When HP bought the failed Palm, it left the same guy (Jon Rubinstein) in charge. Nothing changed. WebOS makes the TouchPad an ideal product for geeks who don’t care about ease of use of efficiency of interface. On the other hand, iOS makes the iPad 2 and iPad 3 so easy to use, your grandmother can figure it out without trouble. That means you’ll be an expert at the iPad in short order…

Resale value: Geeks will argue about the TouchPad interface being masterable, but here’s something they can’t argue with: a year after the iPad 3 arrives, the iPad 4 will replace it. At that time, you should be able to sell your iPad 3 for about a hundred bucks less than you paid for it. That means you only paid $100 for a year’s worth of iPad usage. Contrast that with the HP TouchPad. Even if you manage to find one at $99, when you go to sell it a year from now the resale value will be almost literally zero: the OS will have been long retired, and products from long-discontinued platforms retain almost no sale value going forward. In other words, when all is said and done and you go to part with your tablet, that iPad 3 won’t have cost you any more than the TouchPad. Here’s more on the death of the HP TouchPad. Here’s more on the iPad 3.