HP Touchpad US price cuts permanent - what about A(us)?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 11 August 2011 11:33

Your IT - Home IT

UPDATED: AUSSIE PRICE CUT NOW OFFICIAL. The US, with its deflating dollars, has now seen HP officially cut TouchPad prices by US $100, but is HP hoping overseas sales at original pricing will help make up for the dastardly devaluing US dollario?

OPINION: With the US having had much better prices than most of the rest of the world for years, and a much stronger currency, it was only natural to see prices in other parts of the world traditionally much higher than those in the US.

OFFICIAL NEW PRICING UPDATE: A bit over an hour after we published this article, HP Australia officially informed us of price cuts for Australia, with the 16GB TouchPad now due to sell at AUD $499 and the 32GB for $599, down $100 from the previously announced pricing, from August 15 at Harvey Norman. Original story continues below:

But in much more recent times, the US currency is under threat as the world's reserve currency, and Australia's dollar has soared in value, so much so that despite the inklings of a potential GFC II and the massive losses that many stockmarkets around the world have seen, Australia's dollar is -still- more valuable than the US dollar by around a cent and a bit.

Or at least, it is at the time of writing. So, what is it with HP now selling, after some 'temporary' price cutting that has now become permanent, the 16GB HP TouchPad in the US for $399, and the 32GB for $499, when Australian prices are AUD $598 and $698 respectively for exactly the same device?

Don't get me wrong - the TouchPad is a nice tablet that works as advertised, if not a bit slower than you'd expect for a dual-core Snapdragon-powered processor. Paid apps are coming to the TouchPad's Australian app store once the TouchPad officially goes on sale from August 15, although right now Aussie TouchPad users (which is mainly journalists testing the device) are limited to free apps only.

HP's TouchPad offers a genuine tablet alternative out there that even comes with "Angry Birds", although until the paid app store arrives and we can see what's in it, the HD version of Angry Birds is the biggest gaming drawcard on the device. You can happily surf the web (again, a tad slower than I'd expect), play Flash videos, use Skype and do all of the "standard" tablet things you can do. It's really in the app space that you notice the biggest difference, and HP needs TouchPads in people's hands to convince developers there's a healthy TouchPad market in existence. 

But when it comes to massive US and Australian price gaps, not even Apple had as big a price gap when it launched the first iPad in the US and then the rest of the world as HP does now. Of course with the iPad 2, that gap shrank even further, especially when you take into account that US prices are quoted without sales tax, which has to be paid on top, whereas Aussie prices come with all sales taxes already 100% included.

I have emailed a couple of Australian HP peeps asking for any official comment, but as of publishing this article, there's been no reply.

My guess is that the HP people here are wondering what the heck they're going to do - and how they're going to keep Harvey Norman happy if they start slicing $100 or more off the price of each model.

After all, everyone knows Harvey Norman takes a big chunk of the sales price to feather its own nest - Harvey Norman doesn't really care that much about you, the end customer. If it did, there'd be less screeching TV commercials from the not-so-little GO'er.

After all, let's not forget that the Harvey in Harvey Norman, Gerry Harvey, was very happy to sell out Australia's citizens to ensure that imports became more expensive, presumably in the hope that you'd stop buying online and start buying from Harvey Norman instead.

Well, we're not fools, Gerry Harvey, and Australia made that very clear to you earlier this year - one of the obvious reasons why Mr Harvey has been very Mr Quiet of late, only popping his head up now and then to see if the public artillery was still aimed in Mr Harvey's general direction.

You've gotta read the rest of this royal rant on page two, especially where we take a gander at Harvey Norman's so-called 'Best Price Guarantee'.