Popular daily deal site Woot! is currently offering the discontinued HP TouchPad at a relatively sane price which is only $100 more than its August 2011 firesale price of $150 at $249.99 plus $5 flat-rate shipping. Woot is also including a branded slipcase with the purchase and the tablet is new with a 1 year warranty from HP, which should ease any worries about support should anything be wrong with the unit.
For those that have forgotten, the TouchPad features a 1.2GHz processor with 512MB of DDR2 memory, 9.7-inch capacitive display at XGA (1024 x 768) resolution with an oleophobic (germ resistant) Gorilla Glass front, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera and dual-band 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi radio.
While webOS 3.0 is a rather good operating system on its own and the device makes a fantastic multimedia device and e-reader with its own Kindle app, the device is known to be extremely popular in the Android hacking and mod community owing to its compatibility with Google’s operating system at the basic hardware level, and the latest alpha versions of CyanogenMod for the TouchPad have proven reliable and stable enough to easily replace webOS and its own hacking alternative in Preware, although as an owner of a 32GB model myself, I much prefer the TouchPad virtual keyboard to anything available on Android as my experiences with Google’s operating system have been nothing short of frustrating compared to other smartphone platforms in terms of usability and battery life.
