HP Suggests There May Not Be More TouchPads–I Blame Samsung

Any of you still looking for a TouchPad? Fire sales are tempting. Well HP changed it’s tune. Originally it was talking about when more TouchPads would be available and now it’s moved to an ‘if’ they are available. They posted this today:

Q: When is HP getting more HP TouchPads? One week, two weeks, a month?

We will have more information available in the next few days about whether or not more will be available and if so, what the details will be about the situation.

Their ‘notify’ webpage now reads “We have received an overwhelming number of requests to be notified if the TouchPad is again available for sale.” You know what that used to say? “Due to the significant price reduction, we experienced overwhelming demand for the product and are out of inventory. Please enter your email address below to be notified as soon as we have them back in stock.” And just a week ago they were talking about restocking for sale.

I smell a conspiracy so let’s conspire. There’s speculation that Samsung may be looking to buy webOS from HP. That’s not entirely unrealistic as Samsung isn’t part of the Android-Moto party or the Microsoft-Nokia party but instead they have their own small party (called Bada) that no one really wants an invite for. So I wouldn’t rule them out as a buyer for webOS (although after using a TouchPad for a while I have to question their sanity in not just staying with an established player). But let me get back to the baseless conspiracy theory here. HP is not selling the remaining stockpile of TouchPads because Samsung is going to use them internally to test the viability of webOS and when Samsung buys them they want to give a TouchPad to their employees to let them play with the platform they now own.

See, just like the rest of the web I just made that up, but how far fetched do you think it is? Maybe they are figuring out what to do with the white TouchPads, the 64gb Touchpads, the 3G enabled TouchPads…or the Samsung thing, or maybe they are always disorganized and missing deadlines and that’s why the product line failed…three-sided coin toss.