HP Touchpad Drawing eBay Auction

Submission 20,154

Background

On August 20th, 2011, Hewlett Packard announced they would be drastically reducing the price of their Touchpad tablets from $399 to $99 for the 16 GB model. As a result, the device came into high demand both offline and online, leading to bids of over $250 for the PC tablet on the online auction site eBay. On August 25th, 2011, a hand drawing of a HP Touchpad was listed on eBay with a starting bid of $0.99. The seller hillcrestbunch^[1] of Greenfield, Ohio, listed the auction with the following info:

You are bidding on an awful drawing of an HP Touchpad. I'm posting this because I see idiots bidding $300 on $99 tablets, and $850 on a $99 tablet running Android--so I figured maybe someone would be dumb enough to bid on my drawing. Hell, if this sells for over $800, I'll draw you another one with Android on it AT NO EXTRA COST!
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Sure, I'll admit it: I want a Touchpad, but I'm not spending over $150 on one. Yeah, I hang out on Slick Deal's 1500+ page forum AS A GUEST looking to snag a deal--go ahead, hate me. But only AFTER bidding on this.

This was drawn on a regular sized sheet of white paper. The drawing is in BLUE pen!--my (and likely your) favorite color. This weighs less than an actual touchpad, is flexible, and is 1/1--you can sleep well at night knowing that you're different than the thousands of others who got a "real" touchpad. It can also be viewed as a drawing of a 16 or 32 gb one.

And finally, this touchpad drawing is of the rare WHITE one.
Shipping on this is free. It'll be shipped in a padded envelope.
RETURNS NOT ACCEPTED. Feel free to contact me with questions.
(I'm a broke college student. You aren't spending this money in vein. :D)
Posted with eBay for iPad

Development

Within minutes of the eBay page launch, the listing was spotted on the coupon site SlickDeals^[2] and the site's forum members began bidding on the item. According to the seller's update, the auction amassed over 5,000 views within just one hour, while several eBay users posted similar spoof auction listing of HP Touchpad drawings.

The eBay auction received coverage from the PC / mobile device news sites and review blogs like MobileSyrup^[3], ComputerWeekly^[4], Reverse Street Ads^[5], Nexus404^[6], UberGizmo^[7], Kuaitiful^[8] and eeePC.^[9]

Drawing of Android OS

On Aug, 27th 2011 (18:36:58 PDT), the seller hillcrestbunch added the following information to his listing:

Since this is over $800, I have added a picture of the promised HP Touchpad running Android drawing. I'd prefer WebOS, but the winning bidder will get both. Android drawing is also in BLUE pen.

Most Watched Item on eBay

As the starting bid price continued to go up towards the $100,000 range, more articles regarding the listing appeared on BlackberryOS^[10] and PDFdevices.^[11] According to WatchCount^[12], the listing was the most-watched item on eBay in the category of Art, with 900 eBay users watching the item--almost double the number of watchers on the second most-watched item in eBay's Art category.

The Seller's Response

When asked via Twitter what he would do with the money if someone actually bought the drawing, the buyer responded that he would pay off college loans, and redo his mother's restroom:

@viralysis Pay off college loans. Redo my mom's bathroom. 25% goes to Clinton Fndtn.less than a minute ago via Mobile Web

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Johann Roderick
JohannRoderick

Removal of eBay Listing

Though the listing was slated to end on September 1st 2011, eBay removed it due to a violation of its terms and conditions on Monday, August 29th, 2011. @JohannRoderick informed his Twitter followers that the removal was due to the link to his personal Twitter page. On the same day, the seller "hillcrestbunch" placed the item back up for sale on eBay.^[13]