Haha! Hundreds of thousands of unsold units!
HP is discontinuing their TouchPad tablet and their webOS smartphones. Even the strong advertising campaign featuring our man Manny, Russell Brand, and Lea Michele of Glee couldn't save the TouchPad, which has been demolished on the market by Apple's iPad, and their smartphones haven't been able to compete with Apple and Google. From Wired:
HP’s proprietary mobile platform, acquired from Palm just over a year ago for $1.2 billion, hasn’t taken off. Major competitors Apple and Google dominate the smartphone arena with their respective iOS and Android platforms, while RIM’s BlackBerry OS and Nokia’s Symbian round out the competition. Along with Microsoft’s puny Windows Phone OS, HP trails behind all the other leading platforms in market share.
"It’s obvious that they were using the TouchPad as a make or break event for webOS devices," said Ben Galbraith, former director of developer relations for webOS, in an interview. ... Best Buy retailers offering the tablet for sale are reportedly sitting on hundreds of thousands of unsold units.
I will miss the Manny Pacquiao commercials, but I can't say as even a very casual tech observer that this comes as any surprise. Sometimes when we HP Touch, nobody buys the product and it's killed.