$99 HP TouchPad Sale: HP Looking to Sell WebOS Software
HP is looking to sell Palm's webOS software it purchased just last year for $1.2 billion in an effort to recover from the poor sales of the HP TouchPad, which the company was forced to discontinue in August, although the software is only expected to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters.
The company is still debating whether or not to build a new tablet based on the webOS software. However, HP is still planning to sell tablets that will run on Windows 8 software.
"The question now before us is what do we do with webOS software and do we come back to market with webOS devices," said HP's chief executive MegWhitman. "It obviously will not be the same device but it will be version 2.0."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Sources within the company told Reuters that some companies that could be potentially interested in the system include Amazon, Research in Motion, IBM, Oracle Corp., and Intel Corp.
According to Precentral.net, "HP has called an all-hands meeting of the webOS Global Business Unit this afternoon" to be attended by Whitman and former Palm CEO and current HP SVP Jon Rubinstein, in which the future of the company and its hand in webOS software is expected to be discussed.
The HP TouchPad only reached high levels of success over the summer when HP decided to have a fire sale after discontinuing the device.
The company slashed prices a whopping 80 percent from a starting price of $500 to only $99 for the 16GB because the devices were failing to compete with companies such as Apple and Google, which were offering better quality tablets for the same price. The 32GB HP TouchPad was reduced to $149.
The sale had customers scrambling to snatch up the last of the units after the company agreed to release an extra 200,000 TouchPads at the end of October to meet consumer demand.
