The HP TouchPad: You Could Give It Away With A Hooker and a Bag Of Cool Ranch Doritos, and No One Would Want It

I read on a tech rumor blog just now that the much-lamented and now doomed HP Touchpad is not only being given away with HD televisions in some retailers, it might have it's price quartered to $100.

Quartered. Like William Wallace. But this isn't the Braveheart of tablets. Well, maybe it is; it's a once possible contender for the throne that fought hard for (software) independence from tyrannical social norms imposed upon them by others. And they both failed. Spectacularly.

A hundred bones for a WiFi- and bluetooth-capable tablet? That plays flash? With 16 or 32 GB and a gig of memory? Sounds pretty awesome, suddenly! I actually looked up a couple in-depth reviews because of all that.

Yeah, no, it's still a crap tablet. And it's not like there's going to be any more apps coming out. Ever, really. Maybe if I buy seven and hock them on eBay for parts I can make enough for an iPad.

HP Cell Phone Advertising Is Trippy At 3am

I've been seeing these commercials Hewlett-Packard puts out with celebrities holding mobile devices in front of their faces. Miranda Cosgrove had a Veer phone, Lea Michele has some kind of tablet, and that that tiny but deadly MMA fighter  has another tiny phone.

Here's the thing, the phones end up showing, after user interface examples, the face of the person holding up the device. It's not a false device framing them, it's most likely a device shell with a little green screen on it. Which means there was film of the celebrity saying their final bit where a visible face, then that gets superimposed on the device, which blocks it out until the device moves. Someone even goes in and adjusts the image to be a little off, proportionately. That's class, right there. I mean Miranda Cosgrove and Lea Michele are both pretty cute young women. And that tiny scary dude isn't homely enough that I'd feel safe announcing it on the internet without fear of reper-concussion, so somebody going in to make those adjustments makes them look just subtly weird enough that I'm repulsed by all HP products and spokespersons.

On the up side, thinking about this is like staring into an M.C. Escher painting of advertising.