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TouchPad sales doubled after it was discontinued

Fire sale caught fire: Last chance at Carphone Warehouse

Hewlett-Packard doubled its fondleslab shipments after revealing plans to ditch them and more importantly gutting the price.

Channel analyst Context says HP TouchPad flogged nearly 31,000 devices across the UK, Germany and France in August – twice the amount in July – after a very slow start to the month and confirmation mid-way through it was quitting the slab game.

"The flash sale created a huge surge in demand," said Salman Chaudhry, product manager for mobile computing at Context. Chaudhry described the device as a "dud" whose only major selling point was the low price slapped on it by HP.

He told El Reg: "The hardware was very clunky: it reset frequently and ran slow at times. The way the software and hardware worked was not fluid and from launch a lot of expectations weren't matched."

HP could not make its mind up as to whether the TouchPad was a consumer or commercial product, said Chaudhry, adding that its ecosystem was not as developed as that of Apple's iPad.

A total of 284,000 fondleslabs were sold by resellers in Europe's three largest IT markets last month: Apple came first with 188,000 units; Acer was in second with nearly 44,000 sales; and then came HP with its 31,000 – its highest UK standing for tablet market share.

As revealed by The Reg yesterday, HP is bringing another 6,000 TouchPads to the UK – despite previously stating that the US would get the last of the dregs – but staff will get priority supply on a first-come-first-served basis.

PSG UK and Ireland director Paul Hunter confirmed that channel partners would not get access to the kit but it seems that Carphone Warehouse will be allocated some.

A representative of Carphone Warehouse confirmed it will be taking a "very limited" number of TouchPads "at a select number of stores across the UK", but the firm did not reveal the specifics of the deal. ®

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