All Things Digital’s Arik Hesseldahl reports that sales of HP’s TouchPad at Best Buy aren’t great. In fact, his source says that Best Buy has managed to sell less than ten percent of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has shipped to the retailer so far. It’s causing Best Buy some angst, Hesseldahl says.

HP’s rapid move to cut the TouchPad’s price apparently hasn’t goosed demand, at least sufficiently: according to an analyst Hesseldahl quotes, consumers think that the price might tumble even further. And so rather than buy a cheap TouchPad now, they’re waiting for even cheaper TouchPads that could be in the works.

I like competition and I like the TouchPad’s WebOS software, so I’m rooting for some incarnation of HP’s product to be a winner that sells well. But it’s not the least bit startling to see it get off to a slow start. The first reviews of the TouchPad–here’s mine–were pretty much unanimously lukewarm at best, pointing out bugs, performance issues, and a general lack of apps. Even if you were intrigued by the TouchPad, the reviews would leave you thinking that it made sense to wait rather than rush out and buy one.

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PCWorld’s Jason Cross explains how the MacBook Air is like HP’s HP 35 calculator  from 1972, and why that’s bad news for today’s PC makers (HP included):

HP’s market research said they shouldn’t make and release it – it was going to cost at least $350. At twenty times the cost of a slide rule, nobody was going to buy it! Bill Hewlett said, “I don’t care, I want one of these things” and pushed the project through. It was so revolutionary, so visionary and transformative, that even at a cost of $350+ (that’s 1972 dollars!) the orders were over 10,000 a month.

That temporary sale that knocked $100 off the price of HP’s TouchPad? It’s no surprise that it turned into a price cut, period. The TouchPad now starts at $399, a hundred bucks less than an iPad. I wonder if it’ll boost sales enough to make the TouchPad the first clear hit in the tablet biz that isn’t from Apple?

First, HP introduced its TouchPad tablet at the same starting price as Apple’s iPad: $499. Then it introduced a $50 instant rebate, bringing the price down to $449. Then it announced a special $100 instant rebate this weekend, bringing the price down to $399.

And now WebOSRoundup says that Staples has a $100 coupon that you can use and still qualify for the instant rebate–letting you snag a 16GB TouchPad for $299, or a 40 percent discount off the original price.

That’s one way of answering the question “Why should anyone buy the HP TouchPad instead of the iPad”–give the TouchPad a much more aggressive price. The TouchPad may theoretically be going back to $499, but in the world of tech, there’s almost no such thing as once-in-a-lifetime deals: if a $299 TouchPad is available today, it probably means that all 16GB TouchPads will go for $299 sooner or later. Probably sooner. And while it might help move tablets, it presumably isn’t a sign that HP is thrilled with how well the TouchPad is selling at $499.

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Did Tuesday’s $50 price cut on the HP TouchPad strike you as ho-hum? Perhaps this weekend’s $100 price cut will do the trick.

The instant rebate will be in effect from August 5 through August 7 on HP’s website, PreCentral reports.

The TouchPad debuted to lukewarm reviews, partly because there aren’t a lot of tablet apps on HP’s WebOS platform, and partly because the software was buggy and slow. HP has improved its software through a subsequent update, but the app deficiency remains.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Cisco and China are involving in a Chinese project to install half a million surveillance cameras in the city of Chongqing. They’ll supposedly be used merely to help prevent crime, but the WSJ has a quote from HP’s Todd Bradley that’s kind of chilling: “It’s not my job to really understand what they’re going to use it for.”

Almost all of the reviews of HP’s TouchPad (here’s mine) have the same gist: “This tablet is extremely rough, but WebOS is neat .” HP can apparently live with that.

PreCentral says it has info on HP’s plans for WebOS devices for the rest of the year–including a 64GB white TouchPad, an AT&T “4G” model, a 7-inch tablet, and the Pre 3. Sounds interesting–but judging from the first TouchPad, what WebOS really, really needs is a thorough debugging.

My review of HP’s TouchPad is up over at TIME.com. My take is pretty much the same one as the consensus of the crowd that’s published reviews tonight: very nice interface, aging hardware (even though it’s a brand new device), too many bugs, and too few apps. And definitely not as good as the iPad 2.

Last week, I blogged that for the time being, every new tablet introduction is about one fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of the iPad.” If the TouchPad doesn’t take off–at least without significant software updates–it’ll be because it failed to provide a coherent answer. And that raises a whole bunch of other questions.

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It’s been fifteen months since the first iPad shipped. Nearly every sizable company that makes anything that looks even sort of like a computer or a phone has rushed into the market that Apple created. Many of these companies haven’t yet shipped the tablets they’ve announced. Still, a critical mass of major iPad alternatives are now here–tablets such as Motorola’s Xoom, RIM’s PlayBook, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.

And yet no Apple competitor has started selling anything that clearly answers a fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Sure, it’s easy to point at specific things that other devices do better (or at least differently) than the iPad, and some of the people reading this article can explain why they chose another tablet and don’t regret the move. (If you’re one of them, please do!) Still, sales figures for tablets show that when consumers compare the iPad to other choices, an overwhelming percentage conclude that the iPad is the best option.

As a reviewer of gizmos, I think that the iPad 2 is easily the best tablet on the market–and that most of the competition so far is too half-baked to be credible. As a lover of competition, though, I’m itching to see other tablets arrive that deserve to do well, too. So that question–”Why would somebody buy this instead of an iPad?”–is stuck in my head. I’ve been trying to figure out how an Apple rival can come up with a tablet that pretty much answers that question for itself. And I’ve come up with thirteen ways it could happen.

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Here at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, reporter Kevin Maney is interviewing Jon Rubinstein, former head of Palm and now the guy in charge of HP’s WebOS business. Rubinstein did all the things you’d expect he’d do–he brandished two WebOs phones (the new Veer and upcoming Pre3), showed off a TouchPad tablet, and ran a demo video. Fine. But when Maney asked him whether HP would be willing to license WebOS to other companies, he said that the company had no interest in getting into the licensing game. And then he hedged a bit: he said that it might be interested in working with “one or two special companies.”

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Reuters’ Alastair Sharp has published a story saying that some investors are wondering whether it’s time for a change at the top of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, which is led by Mike Lazaridis (who founded the company in 1984) and Jim Balsillie (who’s been co-CEO since 1992). Sharp’s piece follows a flurry of debate last week about the future of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s president and CEO, who’s been with the company since 1980 and has been CEO since 2000.

I’m not making any predictions about what’s going to happen at either company–except to note that lack of change is usually a more likely outcome than change in these situations, at least in the short term. But the stories got me thinking about the durability of many of the top executives in tech companies. I decided to graph out the management of a few major corporations.

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This sounds neat: HP has announced a wireless mouse that uses Wi-Fi, so it works with any Wi-Fi-equipped computer–no dongle or Bluetooth required.

PC manufacturers like to draw sharp lines between their machines aimed at consumers and the ones built for business. In the real world, things aren’t that simple. I know consumers who like to buy business computers, since they’re often built at least a bit sturdier, aim for reliability rather than bleeding edge-components, feature industrial design that avoids the trendy, and typically come with better warranties. And I also know worker bees who like to get their hands on cool stuff fast and therefore buy consumer systems.

Lately, computer makers seem to be acknowledging that the line between consumery and businessy design is increasingly blurry. HP’s new ProBook 5330m notebook is a case in point: it’s HP’s first business notebook to come with Beats audio, the sound system endorsed by Dr. Dre. The 5330m also features HP’s “Forge” brushed-aluminum industrial design, whose basically philosphy is “Let’s try to make a business notebook that has a bit of style to it, without getting so splashy that it’ll turn off conservative buyers at big companies.” And it’s got a 13.3″ display and no optical drive, a form factor that was pretty darn scarce among corporate machines until recently.

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I’m not in the market for a new phone. But if I were, I’d at least toy with the idea of getting HP’s Veer, the tiny new WebOS phone. And AT&T has announced it’ll be on sale starting May 15th, for $99 on a two-year contract.

HP is apparently set to introduce its latest smartphone based on Palm’s WebOS at a May 2 event, several news outlets including PreCentral are reporting. The diminutive (but certainly not small on features) device is only 55mm (2.2″) wide and 84mm (3.3″) tall, and they’ve somehow figured out how to squeeze a slide out QWERTY keyboard in this thing.

The Veer kind of reminds me of the Nokia 8200 series phones from the early part of last decade that were available through the old AT&T Wireless: HP’s Veer is actually very similar in size. Lets just hope HP’s small phone doesn’t nearly burn people’s ears off like the 8200 was known to do.

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