Starting Sunday, December 11th at 6:00 p.m. Central time, 16GB and 32GB Touchpads will be available on HP’s ebay store. A $79 accessory bundle will also be available, which includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. Look for them in the laptop section. As you would expect, there are some caveats with this deal with the main disappointment being these are refurbished TouchPads rather than the brand new models sold during the first firesale.
Refurbished but still not a bad deal for touchpad.
I’ve been using one of these since the fire sale. They’re a great tablet at the price, but not worth the price they were asking initially.
The latest version of WebOS is vastly superior to the current builds of Android 2.2 for Touchpad. The WebOS marketplace is extremely limited, but for only web browsing, it is a fairly nice OS. It’s not as fast as iPad 2, and even iPad 1 at times, but its cheap and plays most flash content OK. WebOS almost feels like a beta OS at times, and some things don’t work perfectly. The current Android 2.2 builds are much worse, and there are lists of problems with it. The only advantage is you get access to the Android marketplace, which most apps work poorly on the Touchpads resolution. Web browsing also is faster on WebOS when overclocked.
This tablet is worth purchasing at $100-150, if you want to tinker or don’t demand perfection. If you want the best user experience, it’s awfully hard to beat iPad 2. Real world battery life is about 4-5 hours on my Touchpad, whereas its about 10 on iPad 2.
The only thing I like about Touchpad and WebOS is the keyboard, and limited flash support. With a few hacks, you can stream Hulu right from the native site. It’s buggy, crashes, locks up, or the video goes white, but it does work. YouTube takes you to some mobile site that is terrible, and does not allow scrubbing, or any position indication. Theres several other small issues, but most of them are solved by hacking the browsers user agent to a desktop version.
I was trying to order one before I left and Ebay totally took a shit. I got to the Paypal screen but it wouldn’t take the payment and eventually ended up clearing my cart and closing the session.
