HP TouchPad price cuts, tablet price war now on?

With a flood of Android tablets and more on the way from Amazon, Sony, HTC, Huawei and others to join those already on sale, along with the Playbook and the iPad, HP’s TouchPad has a lot of company.

Although Amazon, Sony, HTC, LG, Samsung, Huawei and Lenovo are yet to release their latest tablets in Australia, at least, with HP not yet launching locally until August 15, there brand name tablets on sale from Apple, Asus, Acer, Motorola, Toshiba and RIM in Australia.

That doesn’t even count Microsoft which does have Windows 7 tablets out there by various manufacturers, nor its highly anticipated Windows 8 tablets due next year.

But it’s the iPad 2 that all have to beat, with its popularity propelled by 100,000 apps and its previously hard-to-get nature that undoubtedly still helps every iPad shipped sell quickly.

Meanwhile, other tablet vendors aren’t exactly falling over themselves to declare how successful their various tablets have been – or at least, not yet. 

Already Acer and Asus have 16GB Android Wi-Fi tablets on sale at prices that nicely undercut the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 in Australia, and HP’s TouchPad hasn’t even launched yet locally, not that it’s the only company still to bring product to market.

In the US, where HP’s TouchPad has been available for the last three or so months, “temporary” price cuts have surfaced, probably in an attempt to see how successful they were at stimulating sales.

HP’s own price cut was meant to expire on the 7th of August, so we’ll just have to wait and see whether new “price cut specials” arrive or whether the price cuts suddenly become permanent.

After all, a tablet and OS needs users to grow – you can’t have a thriving ecosystem without end-users, or webOS might end up a $1.2b control system to drive the LCD screens on HP’s printers.

With Android tablets expected to see fierce price competition towards the end of this year, HP will need to do everything in its power to ensure that TouchPads touch the lives of as many people as possible.

With the end of 2011 drawing ever closer, especially with all the global worry about GFC Mark II possibly having hit, that tablet price war is surely coming – if not just to clear stocks to make way for all those 2012 models yet to come!