A Long Wait and a Touching Finish

A Long Wait and a Touching Finish was Originally Posted on September 29, 2011 by lavarock

You may know the story, Hewlett Packard created tablet computers called the Touchpad. You may have missed them though because almost as they hit the shelves, they were discontinued. The approximate $500 price dropped to $150 and the one with less memory went down to $99. They flew off the shelves.

HP decided to clear out their parts cabinet and today they offered HP Employees (and retirees) the chance to buy a 16gb model for the $99 and the 32gb one for $149. The order had to be done online and we could only order 1.

At 6am hawaii time I was ready. The 16gb one showed up but for 10 minutes the 32gb was not available. many people put the 16gb in their baskets and then tried to check out. You know that commercial where swimmers dive off the edge of a pool and the next shot is then slowly gliding through caramel? This site was slower than that!

Often you would get redirected to a “We are really really busy, try again later” page.

You can imagine thousands of people tryuing to buy 1 of 2 items, while the rest of the website tries to service regular customers. You know, those poor souls tring to buy a computer or ink for their printer, etc. If you are one of those and cound not get in, I’m sorry, I was one of those people keeping you out.

My time to buy my tablet was an hour and a half and then I spent another couple of hours trying t ohelp my friend (another retiree) out because he could not get in and so far, I was the expert.

When I finally was bale t oget an order confirmation I found I had 3 of the things in this guys queue. We were only allowed 1, so I called the toll free number and was on hold for at least 20 minutes. So far they cancelled on and the order still shows 2. I hope HP doesn’t caalcell everything, which is what they implied. At least I know that the customer service rep was told to cancel all but one. Time will tell.

So what’s the big deal with a product that is already obsolete? Well fort hat price you could buy a digital frame for photos and it would not have audio or internet capability, be able to show movies, etc. We are also hoping that someone will port more software and another opertaing system to it.

Even so, they sell pretty well on Craigslist and Ebay, although that is not my intention.