Looking for a piece of Hewlett-Packard history? Don't pick up a TouchPad – the WebOS-powered tablet that found more success in its death than its life, earning HP second-place honors for tablet sales between January and October. Pick up its rarer cousin: The TouchPad Go, a never-released variant of the TouchPad that was designed to be smaller and speedier than HP's discontinued 9.7-inch tablet.
According to The Verge, there's a pre-release version of the TouchPad Go currently sitting on eBay for the cool price of $700 as of this article's writing. Or, in HP terms, just a bit over the total cost of four 32-gigabyte TouchPad tablets at their fire-sale prices (or just $100 over the cost of a 32-gigabyte TouchPad at its original price point).
What does the somewhat-significant investment get you? For starters, a seven-inch tablet device that's allegedly slightly thinner than its full TouchPad counterpart. The 3G-friendly TouchPad Go that's being auctioned comes with 32 gigabytes of total storage capacity nestled beneath its 1024-by-768 screen – a slightly different load-out than the TouchPad proper, which didn't pack any kind of 3G connectivity into the mix.
The TouchPad Go is also speedier than the TouchPad, due to its inclusion of a 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor that's all of 300MHz faster than the TouchPad's 1.2GHz chip. Unless, of course, you're one of the lucky few to also own a limited-release white version of HP's TouchPad, which kicked the processer up to 1.5GHz and bumped up its flash storage to 64 gigabytes in total.
When last leaked, specs for the TouchPad Go also included a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera – another slight variation from the original TouchPad, which only included a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera into its design. The TouchPad Go should join its larger sibling in supporting Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, and Wireless-b/g/n connectivity.
And that's pretty much the tale of the tape. According to reports, HP's decision to cancel the TouchPad Go allegedly left the company's suppliers with a smorgasbord of unwanted parts for what would have been a 100,000-unit production line of tablet devices. So, if your TouchPad Go breaks post-eBay purchase, perhaps you can work out some kind of inexpensive repair arrangement…