On Thursday August 18, 2011 HP announced that it would "discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones." That began a run on the now discontinued HP TouchPad tablets. The TouchPad has a 9.7 inch screen with 1024 x 768 resolution. It has a 1.2 Ghz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 1 GB of memory and 16 or 32 GB of storage. It began shipping in July 2011.
I saw the sale on slickdeals.com on Saturday and went to the BestBuy in Southaven. The representative in the tablet department said that they had some but had been told to take them off the shelves. I went home and placed an order on bestbuy.com for in-store pickup at Southaven, MS. That store showed "in stock."
I hadn't gotten a "Ready for Pick-up" e-mail by the time I left to go to the store Sunday morning. When I got there 10 minutes before opening there were 4 people in line. By the time it opened there were 25 people in line.
There was a person just inside the door telling everyone that they were out of stock on TouchPads. I proceeded to the Customer Service desk and presented my paperwork. As I waited a manager was nearby. She was saying that that store only had 8 TouchPads before this clearance started. She said that they had 2 "OMS" (online) orders (one was mine) from last night that they had put back and that was all that was left.
Mine was there and I had no trouble checking out. They didn't automatically price match but the Operations Supervisor called the 800 # and waited 20 minutes.
There seemed to be some consternation about whether they were really supposed to deliver to the online customers so I politely picked up my TouchPad and receipt and excused myself!
I went back to the store early in the week and they gave me the price match of $321.00.
Now let's see how long it takes to get Android on it.
