HP’s new TouchPad tablet saw a $50 price cut about a month after it was released. A few days later, HP announced a weekend promotion that brought the price down another $50. Now, the $100 price cut has been made permanent, pegging the tablet’s starting price at $400, per Engadget.
This is a smart, aggressive move by HP as it demonstrates that the company understands how much more important it is to get people in the door and using the tablet and its WebOS software than it is to make money off the hardware right away. The more people that use HP’s WebOS software, the more high-quality apps will get developed for it and, in turn, more WebOS-based products (smartphones, computers, and tablets) will get sold.
(MORE: HP’s TouchPad: A Promising Tablet That Needs More Polish)
And speaking of more WebOS-based products, it appears that HP has submitted a 7-inch TouchPad tablet to the FCC, as noted by This Is My Next. It looks like it’ll be called the “TouchPad Go” and come in four models: 16- and 32-gigabyte versions with and without 4G wireless chips.
There’s no telling when they’d actually hit the market but I’d venture a guess that if we didn’t see them by the holidays, we’d very likely see them in early January at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.
MORE: HP Is Committed to Its ‘WebOS’ Platform (and It Should Be)