A limited number of refurbished HP TouchPads will reportedly go on sale at HP’s eBay Store starting at 6 p.m. Central Time (7 p.m. Eastern) on Sunday, December 11, 2011. The prices will be the same as the massive sell-off in August of this year. The 16 GB refurbished TouchPad will go for $99 US, while the 32 GB TouchPad will go for $149 US. There will also be a $79 accessory pack for sale that includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. Customers may only use Paypal and are limited to a maximum of 2 Touchpads. Each TouchPad will also come with a 90-day warranty.
Advanced warning of HP’s plans was obtained by a leaked internal HP memo obtained by TechCrunch earlier this week. HP wanted to hold the sale off to allow its employees to get first dibs on tablets.
HP’s TouchPads run a WebOS (Linux) operating system originally designed by Palm (HP bought Palm in 2010 in a $1.2 billion deal). Shortly after the release of the TouchPad earlier, HP decided to get out of the business of making hardware all together and initiated a fire sale of the tablets in August after experiencing disappointing sales. WebOS never took off because it faced an already-saturated development market with developers focusing their efforts on Android, Apple and Blackberry devices.
Rumors have it that Android developers are working on a way to crack the HP TouchPad to allow it to run an Android OS. Keep your ears to the ground as taking a $99 gamble on a cheap tablet may be worth it.
