I thought the same thing. It’s a brilliant move if it was planned, but its a fool’s move if they don’t try to capitalize on the situation. Apple makes millions (est. $250-500m) per year off the app store for hosting, curation and bandwidth of applications. There’s a lot of work involved, but a majority of what they make from the store is easy money. They don’t have to write the apps, they just have to sell them. If HP doesn’t look at what they’ve done and realize that they can subsidize the cost of the device (sell at a loss like MS did with XBox) but still make money on the back end through app sales – they’re nuts.

Look, if anything this just showed Google what they can (and should do) with Motorola. I buy Apple products because they are the best thing on the market hands down. But, if you showed me a Galaxy S II side by side with an iPhone 5 and told me the Galaxy is $200 off contract, but the iPhone cost $699 – I’m taking the Galaxy.

I do find it interesting that HP came out and made a statement that they are going to keep using webOS, at least in printers and laptops, and that they will continue to update the TouchPad and Veer. I don’t how much we can trust this, but it is curious.

Chris Ziegler had a great write-up on the TouchPad fire sale earlier today (http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/22/hp-touchpad-99-in-your-words/) where he asked 50 people who purchased the TouchPad at the reduced price why they did it. The findings were definitely interesting. I highly recommend taking a look at it, if you have a chance.

I have seen where a few different tech writers today have wondered out loud whether this was either a stunt by HP (highly unlikely), or possibly an eyeopener for their brass that webOS still has legs. Ziegler’s findings that many who purchased it want it to run webOS, rather than to hack it with Android, and that a large number would have paid more for it were surprising. With an instant installed base of up to 250,000 in a few weeks, it is possible that HP may have just paid $100 million to purchase an ecosystem. In my opinion, it is completely accidental, but hopefully they will still take advantage.

The TouchPad died long before it ever hit the market – iPad or no iPad – it was doomed because the people at the top didn’t care about it enough to make it successful.

As for the TouchPad, I wanted to put it through a thorough test, and doing that means using its primary features. Being able to view Flash content in the native web browser is a primary feature. In my use over the course of three days, the TouchPad’s battery life isn’t as impressive as my iPad 2’s under similar heavy use. If the Touchpad was still $450, that would be a big problem. At $99-$150, not so much. It’s good, just not great.

Like the rest of the article, though, this is all just my opinion on the device from the perspective of an iOS user. It’s not meant to be a scientific study. It’s for those readers of the site who know Apple products, but might be interested in the TouchPad at the currently reduced prices. I compared the TouchPad to the iPad because it provides a frame of reference for those of us who are familiar with it as our primary device.

I’m not saying that WebOS should have beaten out either iOS or Android. I think Palm had a real opportunity to get traction before Android took off, but they squandered it. Who knows if they could have kept up even if they had, but the opportunity was there.

The real BetaMax comparison comes in right now. HP should have curb stomped the Playbook and Windows Phone. They had a head start on both, and as paltry as their App Catalog is, they had more apps than either of those platforms did last year. Now WebOS will probably disappear, RIM will probably never get QNX right, and Windows Phone is just now really catching up, and will never get put on a tablet. We will end up with another version 1.0 product in Windows 8 with a tablet skin next year. Oh goody. Just what mobile needs. More products that aren’t ready for prime time.

Those are the cheaper and less featured alternatives winning out because HP didn’t get the business side of things taken care of. They had a good OS to work with and killed it with bad decisions.