I was able to buy a $99 HP Touchpad tablet with WebOS - Quick Review

The HP Touchpad Tablet

I'm a real sucker for a deal. I always say "Hell, I'd buy an elephant if I found one for 80% off!".  Well how about a $400 tablet for 75% off?  HP introduced the Touchpad tablet just a few months ago and they've already discontinued it due to dismal sales, dropping the price down to $99 (16GB) / $149 (32GB). The trick is finding them at the sale price before they are all gone.  I was able to score one from Bestbuy.com and pick it up at the store last weekend.  You may have luck for the next week or so just showing up at your local BB in the morning to see if they have anything.  It's possible that HP.com maybe be getting more in next week as well.

I've been planning to get an iPad at some point - maybe waiting until next year to get an iPad 3 but I certainly couldn't pass up a $99 tablet with a very similar feature set.  Even if you never use a single "app", the browser built into the Touchpad is excellent and it fully supports Adobe Flash.  This means that most of your favorite websites will be fully functional.  You don't need an app for every little thing - news, weather, sports scores, music streaming,  etc.  In fact, the most impressive thing was that I was able to run a Yahoo Fantasy Football mock draft on it, which is a major Flash-heavy site.

The app store is very limited.  Maybe 7,000 apps.  But it's got the biggies like Facebook, various Twitter clients, weather, CBS Sports, USA Today, Pandora (though it's designed for small screens like a Palm phone), etc.  No Netflix streaming app that I could find. Though maybe the site works via Flash?  I read reports that Hulu.com works in the browser.

Honestly, I haven't done much email on it but the email client seems just fine.  You can add multiple accounts and the OS has some cool features for sliding the windows around to let you determine what you want to see - email accounts list, inbox list, message body, etc.

I've ran into a few articles talking about ways to boost the performance and make it run a little quicker, via overclocking and disabling some of the excessive system logging.  Check out this article from ZDNet for details.  I haven't tried it yet myself.

I also like the fact that I can print directly from the Touchpad to my HP Color LaserJet CM1415 wirelessly.

You'll probably want a few accessories.  Here is the official HP case.














And there is also an official HP wireless bluetooth keyboard which could be pretty handy.