By YOUNG MONEY Staff
24 August 2011

Hewlett-Packard announced the end of its short-lived line of tablet and smartphones, ye the cancellation ironically offered interesting insight into the market in the process, according USA Today's Mark Smith.

Released in July of this year, the HP TouchPad suffered from a crippling lack of support from third-party programmers, as the only substantial offerings for the tablet were some of the largest apps, including Angry Birds and Kindle.

The device also faced hardware shortcomings compared to current generation iPads, like limited camera capabilities as well as being larger and heavier than Apple's device.

Nevertheless, Smith noted that the TouchPad quickly became the best selling tablet in the country over the weekend as stores looked to dump the device, lowering the price to as little as $99.99 from the original $499.99 asking price.

Smith suggests that this surprising success for a device that obviously could not compete at normal prices tapped into a massive underlying market interested in a low-cost tablet option.

With so many new TouchPad owners, PC Magazine has created a list of the best apps that are available for the device. Perhaps a longer term solution, The Los Angeles Times reports that a group of hackers going by Touchdroid are aiming to overwrite the TouchPad's webOS with Google's Android operating system.