Brits told how much they'll pay for HP TouchPad

Ha ha

Buy our stuff! As expensive as the other one, except nobody is writing apps for it! Be the loser among your friends!

Seriously, if they cannot make it cheaper, I don't see how they can get any market traction. Whatever the virtues of their stuff, it is not going to make people forget about the App Store™.

if i am going to pay for...

an iPad i want an iPad - not a copy iPad, ask RIM they will explain it.

Furious

I am absolutely furious with HP for making me wait so long for such a meagre offering, and then daring to set the price to match the iPud. Just who do they think they are? Just how gullible do they think I am?

I wanted this partly out of affection for the days of my palm pilot, and partly because I was expecting good things from the OS. But I am being asked to buy a pig in a poke, and having been promised jam tomorrow if I wait for the tablet, I will still have to wait for the jam because they have not drummed up a significant developer base.

I was really really looking forward to this, and feel badly let down. I even wanted a pre3 phone to do the touch-and-couple business and use as a modem link. But I will have to wait even longer for that.

It won't do, HP, it won't do. I am furious with you.

Oh, and the 32G version is USD600 in the states, which is UKP372 today. What is the extra £107 for?

smell the fail

Bets this thing is DOA and buried in six months? Lets see a me too affair late to market without the massive app base/fanboi prestige of the iPAD and without the openess of the competitive multivendor Android. The Dell Streak has met its epic failure match.

Let me check, did I bring my careface?

It's really hard to see any appeal here, it doesn't have the app support of iOS or Android, and hell, don't even have the upselling potential of the horrid Blackberry tablet effort.

So I am struggling to see why I would want a WebOS tablet, at all. I did try, but in the absence of any single unique selling point, it just seems like a feeble exercise in "me too". Maybe I am wrong, maybe it will have some killer capability that isn't yet obvious. If not, I don't see why it exists at all.

"I can smell your Zuuuuuuuune..."

At least it isn't widescreen

Using it in a portrait mode won't suck.

So it is priced at the same level as the iPad.

That is way too expensive.

How many apps are there available and at what cost?

Sorry HP. This is one device that won't boot my pension (yeah I'm an HP Pensioner)

Anon coz HP is just as bad as BB for spying its employees.

Same price as an iPad?

You've got to be kidding. Their competitors seemed determined to hand the market to Apple. HP are new entrants to the market with no obvious advantages up against a mind-blowingly strong competitor. It doesn't take a genius...

Beggars Belief

Honestly, the ipad has the headstart on the market, everyone else is playing catch up. So you have to wonder why HP think people would buy this device if they can just get an ipad instead?

Even if it is *better* than the ipad HP have no market traction.

I'm sure there will be 100 geeky el reg commentards who pop up to decry The Cult of Jobs, The Walled Garden and all the other criticisms that are (sometimes deservedly) pointed at Cupertino but that's not the point, geeky commentards will be buying netbooks anyway because they can't use a tablet to run Matlab and code PHP on the train.

So why would your average suburban Joe or Jane choose HP over apple? They don't care that the HP has dual core snapdragon, they care that the app store has a shed load of fart apps.

Does HP have an app store? I'm guessing they do.

Is it bigger or better than the apple one?

Somehow I doubt it. Not at this point anyway, and if they want it to grow to match apple they will need punters, lots of punters, to attract the devs.

Pricing like this is unlikely to attract the number of punters they will require to make a sustainable ecosystem around webOS, which is a shame.

A damned shame, really. It's probably quite nice.

Overcharged upgrades

They've also "borrowed" Apple's strategy of removing the Micro-SD slot and charging £80 for £5's worth of flash RAM.

I'm more interested in the 7-inch than this, but that'll probably be over-priced too.

Two relevant but overlooked points:

1) They cannot compete on price. As someone whose name I forget amply analysed and demonstrated, Apple own and/or control the distribution chain for their products far more tightly than their competition, so they can price cheaper. HP, RIM etc have to deal thru regular retail channels who demand their own margins, so expecting them to be cheaper is a waste of dream time.

2) Not as many apps in the HP equivalent of any "app store" is also missing the point. Without "Flash" on the iPad you HAVE to have apps to do anything decent on an iPad (or iPhone). When you have Flash support on your device a vast swathe of **platform specific** apps are rendered redundant. You just don't need 00,000's of apps to be built specifically for your device when you can run the *same* app you already run on your Windows/Mac/Linux machine.

A 3rd point is that it's not just "the same as an iPad at the same price". A key differentiator is that you are not confined to using your device only within Steve Jobs "walled garden". My partner has an iPad and the lack of interoperability between apps is a constant source of frustration, despite the fact that overall she likes the device (as do I, truth be told).

But both she, and more especially I, am looking for something that has the same "out of the box" switch on and go couch surfing capabilities as an iPad but with just a teensy little bit less in the way of technical and usability hand-cuffs imposed by the manufacturer.

Maybe the TouchPad is it, or maybe the PlayBook. I'd like to get my hands on one to find out.

Oh, and I LOVE the TouchStone cable-free charging system that is - afaik - unique to HP. The iPad can only DREAM of that, and I bet it's one thing that Mr Jobs lies awake at night trying to figure out how he can replicate without violating someone's patents. Or maybe he'll just go ahead and be damned with violating patents.

Title

What is the reason for not including an SD port and HDMI? I mean aside from greed. It's a complete no no for me, it's one of the pissers about the iPad, flash I can mostly live without, but personally I'd rather have an SD slot than a crappy camera. And yea, the cost is too high, they're not even trying to compete.