Dismal TouchPad Sales Report Surfaces

Posted By: Kris Keilhack Thursday, August 18, 2011 11:16:38 AM

AllThingsD has released a very grim piece on the HP TouchPad's fortunes during its first six weeks at retail. The curiously-timed piece by Arik Hesseldahl, entitled "OuchPad: BestBuy Sitting on a Pile of Unsold HP Tablets" comes on the eve of HP's quarterly earnings announcement. In short, the reports states that the TouchPad has been far from a smashing sales success at all of HP's retail partners but has particularly irked Best Buy, the nation's largest electronics retailer and a major HP channel partner.

According to the report, Best Buy has only sold through 25,000 TouchPads out of their initial device allocation of 270,000. One anonymous source quoted within the article calls those sales numbers "charitable". Apparently, Best Buy is so disappointed with the TouchPad's sales performance that they are refusing to pay HP for the inventory and a high-ranking HP executive (possibly Todd Bradley) has been sent to Best Buy HQ to do damage control, bringing to mind shades of Jon Rubinstein's "Project Jumpstart" efforts detailed in an internal email in the aftermath of the disastrous Pre Plus launch on Verizon last year.

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