HP has officially killed webOS. Offed it with two dinky sentences in a dinky little press release. It's sad, sure. But what about everyone who bought the $500 (then $450, then $400) hunk of now-scrap metal that's called TouchPad? Updated.
Now that HP is abandoning webOS product, they've effectively rendered TouchPad useless. Developers won't build apps for it any more than they would for MS-DOS. There will be no firmware updates, no bug fixes. It's a product trapped in time, exiled to the Phantom Zone. It had more than its share of problems. Now, it'll have them forever.
When you buy a tablet you're not just buying the hardware. You're buying the promise of what that hardware can do for you. You're buying access to present and future apps, to modifications and improvements and an entire platform's ecosystem. So what about those people, as few as they apparently were, based on the bargin bin pricing of late, who bought a TouchPad in good faith, only to be abandoned by the company that sold it to them? It's like buying a car and finding out a month later that it doesn't take gasoline anymore.
And it's not like HP gave it the old college try. They gave TouchPad six weeks before they pulled the plug. Six weeks! You can barely grow a Chia pet in that time, much less a market share. TouchPad was in front of the firing squad before it was ever released. It was a bad faith sale. It should be remedied.
So how about it, HP? How about offering refunds on all HP TouchPads sold since the launch? You're the ones who killed it. No reason to leave the blood on other people's hands.
Update: As of today, it looks as though HP is offering full refunds for those who want to return their TouchPads and making up the price difference for those who bought before the fire sale. They've also reportedly asked their retail partners to follow suit; it's still unclear exactly who will be offering what at this point, but Best Buy, at least, has extended their full refund return window to 60 days for TouchPad buyers. Hats off to you, HP.