HP needs 6-8 weeks to ship additional TouchPads, according to a leaked email sent to customers. HP is prepping one last run for its defunct tablet.
Hewlett-Packard
will apparently need close to two months to start fulfilling backorders for the
(temporarily) revived TouchPad tablet.
"It will take
6-8 weeks to build enough HP TouchPads to meet our current commitments, during
which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground
shipping," read an email sent to customers and reprinted in a Sept. 7 posting
on the
Precentral.net blog. "You will receive a shipping
notification with a tracking number once your order has shipped."
That would
place the new TouchPads in consumers' hands sometime in either late October or
early November. The reduced-price devices are not returnable, according to the
email.
HP originally
acquired webOS as part of its takeover of Palm in 2010. The manufacturer
originally had big plans for loading the operating system onto a variety of
devices, including tablets, smartphones, desktops and laptops.
However, sales
of its TouchPad proved anemic, and HP made the decision to end the tablet's
life after a mere six weeks on the market. In order to clear out inventory, the
manufacturer sliced the starting price to $99, which sparked a surge of
consumer interest. In the wake of that, HP made the decision to revive the line
for a limited time.
In addition,
HP plans on dividing its webOS arm into two separate units reporting to
different areas of the company, according to two leaked memos that have made
their way onto the Web.
The webOS
software assets will find their way into the arms, however welcoming, of its
Office of Strategy and Technology. The other parts of the webOS corporate
infrastructure, presumably including its hardware interests, will continue as
part of the Personal Systems Group, which manufactures HP's PCs, and which will
presumably be spun off into its own entity under the terms of the company's new
strategy.
"We have
decided that we'll be most effective in these efforts by having the teams in
webOS software engineering, worldwide developer relations and webOS software
product marketing join the Office of Strategy and Technology," Todd Bradley,
executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, wrote in an email
circulated to the webOS developer team and also leaked onto
Precentral.net. "The remainder of the webOS team,
under Stephen DeWitt, will continue to report into PSG."
According to
at least one analyst, flooding the market with additional TouchPad devices
could have significant benefits for HP going forward.
A "larger
installed base of TouchPad and webOS devices should increase the value of webOS
in a potential sale," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu wrote in a research note
widely circulated on
Barron's and other financial Websites. "We
believe logical buyers may include Samsung Electronics, Research In Motion,
HTC, Amazon.com, Facebook, Sony, Microsoft and others."
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