HP Archive

Today marks the launch of the liquidation of HP Touchpad tablet computers – sparking what might be the biggest dealhunter hunt of the year (more on that later). But more importantly, was the HP Touchpad site hacked today?

Christopher Paul Burke pointed me to a video on the HP United Kingdom website inside the section about the Touchpad. If you look at the site, there are 4 “overview videos” – each with a thumbnail. If you click any of the videos, a very different video with a woman plays. And the same video plays for all 4 overview videos. The same video is available on the HP video library site.

Updated 5pm – it appears HP has removed all main Touchpad pages in each country so the videos are now gone. The video is still available in their video library site.

The woman in the video talks about being a happy slave and how she will manage everything and work overtime without asking for overtime pay. She only wants peanuts for pay? Seriously this has to be a hack.

If you visit other country websites including the Canada version, the videos also seem to be replaced with the same video as the UK site above. The U.S. HP Touchpad site does not appear to be affected since the videos are with celebrities and posted on YouTube.

Leave a comment if you are experiencing the same video issue as you browse your local country HP Touchpad website.

Based on a number of conversations on the deal boards and confirmed by PreCentral, it appears that beginning tomorrow you will be able to purchase a HP Touchpad for $99 for the 16GB model and $149 for the 32GB model.

I have read a good number of blog posts about HP’s decision to discontinue their newly launched TouchPad and so far I haven’t found any posts that discuss what HP will offer to early adopters who ran out and bought the device during its short retail run. In fact, it’s not just early adopters — I watched several presentations on QVC pumping the HP TouchPad as a much better device than those “pad devices” because you could run multiple apps, etc.

Several years ago Apple offered a store credit for the early adopters who paid a higher price for their iPhones – and those devices weren’t canceled! HP really needs to do something here for those customers who ran out and purchased their “better tablet” — and they probably should have announced an offering before deciding to liquidate all HP Touchpad inventory.

I am not a mobile OS expert by any means but I wonder if there is a way to get Android to run on the HP Touchpad. The device apparently has the needed hardware and chipset to run Android. Frankly HP should hire a team to quickly make a utility to do the conversion. I asked on Twitter if it was possible to convert the software but didn’t receive any responses.

Maybe there is a golden quick flip business opportunity here for a mobile hacker – offer a conversion utility to make Android run on the HP Touchpad and charge $50 for it – so for $150 you get a great hardware offering running a mobile OS that isn’t going to discontinue operations tomorrow.

Something tells me that if you want one of these HP Touchpad devices for $100 – you better be quick because many will hedge their bets that eventually Android will run on the device and it will be a big win over spending an average of $400 for a current top-tier Android device.