Whether we got our mitts on one of those new tablets or not, we still followed the HP TouchPad Tablet Saga this year like it was a Kardashian.

The HP TouchPad Saga is the Tablet News Story of the Year. No way José, you say? What about the story of the overwhelming dominance of the Apple Ipad with the release of Ipad 2 earlier this year, plus the pent-up demand for Ipad3? In the business of touchscreen tablets, the Ipad isn’t the elephant in the room; it is the room (Amazon, with its Kindle Fire, is building its own room). Or, you say, what about Apple and Samsung duking it out country-by-country over the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? That’s a helluva story. Or, what about the legacy of Steve Jobs — of the man, and the team he assembled, with the vision, determination and resources to actually make tablet pcs a hugely marketable reality? Jobs story is, of course, much more than just a tablet story.

Any other year and any of those tablet news stories could probably easily rank on top. For 2011, however, the Tablet News Story of the Year goes to the HP TouchPad saga.

Snagging A Tablet
Did you happen to snag one of the new tablets in August, when they were suddenly dumped on the market for $99 bucks? Not me. I figured I’d swing by the local Best Buy and pick mine up early Monday; two days after the sale began.

"you snooze, you lose"

“You snooze you lose, you silly, silly man,” their eye rolls seemed to inform me. I emailed my nephew Brian, a ninja dealfinder, to see if he had any leads. He told me none of his orders had gone through. He threw me a bone, giving me a link to Slickdeals.com and instructed me to watch the live forum. He wished me luck and signed off, saying, “I feel I need to pull myself away from the computer and all this TouchPad madness.”

Good point, in hindsight. I, like a multitude of others, eventually did the same as Brian – we stopped looking for our tablet deal. Or, we eventually snagged one off Ebay for more than double the fire sale price. But whether we got one of those new tablets or not, many of us continued to follow the TouchPad Tablet Saga in 2011 as if it had been: (please fill in your choice of any “celebrity for being a celebrity” here).

But why?
Psychologists, and the bible, have long talked about the strong lure of something you can’t have, and sociologists can tell you all about the “mob” effect. This whole saga began when HP CEO Léo Apotheker announced that the company would be exiting the personal computer business, citing “The Tablet Effect” as a primary reason. By that he meant that the growth of the tablet market (which, at least for the immediate and intermediate future, means Apple IPad), is quickly eroding the margins of the PC business and HP needed to cut bait and get the hell out, fast.

HP discontinued its TouchPad Tablet the next day, placing the tablet’s operating system, WebOS, in limbo — to be either sold or spun-off. HP Purchased Palm in 2010 primarily to acquire its WebOS mobile platform, and now it was ditching it. HP paid $1.26 billion for Palm. Ouch! Or, maybe more appropriately, “OuchPad,” as AllthingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl referred to HP’s beleaguered tablet when breaking the story that Best Buy wanted HP to take back its inventory. For many, this was the first big sign of trouble for the new tablet.

A Zombie Tablet?
Through a series of events and drama following the one-two sucker punch by Apotheker, the ill-fated TouchPad Tablet quickly became the de facto face of WebOS. And if there were to be no more WebOS, then the TouchPad would be an orphan, or worse, a zombie. But zombie or no zombie, who doesn’t love a deal? For many of us, suddenly, somehow, Black Friday and Cyber Monday had popped up in the middle of August. Ninety-nine dollars for new tablets that had been $399 the week before, and $499 a few weeks before that, had more people lined up than the local all-you-can-eat shrimp place.

Even after we stopped looking for our tablet deal, though, a lot of us still couldn’t stop watching the melee. On the Slickdeals live site, for instance, many of the posters were panicking because they hadn’t yet been able to snag their deal. But the immense volume of pilfered or hacked Best Buy inventory lists flying around the site could convince anyone that some of these guys could give Wikileaks a run for their money.