We have an interesting set of deals today, both Woot! and Sellout.Woot! are offering the same product – almost. Sellout.Woot! is offering a refurbished HP TouchPad 9.7” 16GB Wi-Fi Tablet for $169.99 + $5 S&H
. While Woot! is offering a refurbished HP TouchPad 9.7” 32GB Wi-Fi Tablet for $219.99 + $5 S&H
. $50 gets you an extra 16GB of storage.
The TouchPad has decent hardware – 9.7″ 1024×768 display, dual-core 1.2GHz CPU, front-facing 1.3MP camera for video calls, 16/32GB of storage, 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band WiFi, and more. The downside is that it is running webOS, which is a dead platform.
Yes, I know, HP is open-sourcing webOS and renaming it Open webOS in the hopes that developers will continue to work on it and that other hardware vendors might pick it up. I’ll believe both of those when I see them. I’m sure some developers will work on it, but I don’t expect a critical mass to really keep it moving forward. And I don’t expect any new hardware vendors except maybe some real niche players. Android and iOS simply dominate, and webOS offers little to attract a vendor instead of Android.
But the good news is you can turn the TouchPad into an Android tablet with only minor effort. So you can have an Android tablet with fairly solid specs for a lot less than the actual Android tablets go for, if you’re willing to do a little work to install it.
