Jun 1, 2012 10:45 AM EDT by LAPTOP EditorsThere are tablets that are mildly disappointing, you know, the kind that don’t quite live up to their potential. And then there are slates that are so bad they should have never seen the light of day. We’re talking about the kind of fail that should cause a company to rethink its whole product strategy. Some of these tablets were so awful they caused their makers’ stocks to tank. Hard. Here are the top 10 tablet flops.
HP TouchPad
Putting the multitasking-friendly webOS into a tablet with a dual-core processor and Flash support seemed like a great idea. Too bad the TouchPad was sluggish and buggy, had short battery life and lacked compelling apps. HP killed this product just 49 days after its launch, and the last remaining TouchPads were fire-sold for $99. This tablet was such a failure that HP pulled the plug on all webOS hardware after spending $1.2 billion on Palm just 6 months earlier. Not coincidentally, HP replaced its CEO not long after.
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June 2nd, 2012 at 2:47 am
Playbook OS 2.0 is a lot more elegant and less resource intensive than android. True multitasking and the best browser on a tablet. If its a flop its like Beta to Android’s VHS. It is just too bad that they rushed the release before the OS was ready. At $199, it’s superior to any 7″ Android tablet at that price and probably $50 to $100 more.
June 4th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
My Dell Streak 5 still kicks! For an android phone it is awesome! The 5″ screen is rockin’ and the CPU is just fine. It’s only drwback is poor support from Dell. To this day I have strangers asking where can they get one? It needs a better camera and audio chip though…