“HP continually evaluates pricing for its products and is pleased to permanently extend its back-to-school promotion on the HP TouchPad,” the company said in a statement to CNET.

With the price drop, the 16GB version sells for $399 and the 32GB model goes for $499, both $100 below a comparably equipped iPad 2. However, the move doesn’t put the company at the ultra-low-end for tablets. Vizio, for example, this week announced a $299, 8-inch Android tablet being sold at places such as Wal-Mart and Costco.

The price cut comes barely a month after the tablet went on sale. The TouchPad has debuted to decidedly mixed reviews, with significant criticism leveled against the product for its bulky size and lack of apps, among other issues.

A recent promotion on deal-of-the-day site Woot had the 16GB version on sales for $379 — $120 off the then-list price — but managed to generate just 612 sales.

The device will now have a suggested price of $169.99, down from $249.99.

Initially, Nintendo was eager to report how well the game unit would sell, but even after its first month on sale, the older DS continued to outsell the newer device.

Clearly, Nintendo had to offer more incentives to buy it, despite more game releases and a major software update in June.

Since going on sale in the U.S. on March 27, Nintendo says it has sold 830,000 units.

While the device got off to a bumpy start after Nintendo warned viewing 3-D may be bad for some children, it’s more likely the overall game environment that is impacting sales.

Nintendo must compete against the iPod touch, which has access to countless free and 99 cent games. With this price drop, The 3DS now will now cost less than the 8 gigabyte iPod, which runs $229.

Additionally, if 3-D was the draw for consumers, now it is built into a handful of consumer electronics, including the EVO 3D smartphone.

The 3DS also tried to compete against the iPod and smartphones by integrating new features, such as providing a free Netflix application, which allows members to instantly watch TV episodes and movies on the device.

Additionally, starting on Sept. 1, Nintendo will begin giving away some games for free. 3DS Ambassadors will be able to download 10 virtual console games at no charge, games such as Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Jr., and The Legend of Zelda. Ambassadors are users who sign into the eShop at least once before midnight on Aug. 11.

The magazine publisher sold some 95,000 digital copies of its June issue at $4.99, the same price the ink-and-paper edition commands. So why sell the July issue at $3.99–while also knocking down the price of the first issue to the same level?

Condé says it will be experimenting with digital magazine pricing for months to come. But Wired Editor Chris Anderson, who wants us to know that he doesn’t control his magazine’s sales price, makes the common-sense argument: Digital editions should cost less than physical ones because there’s no distribution cost.

“I would say that right now, all of us have opinions about the perfect price,” he says. “My feeling, my own personal instinct, is that digital should be at slight discount to print.”

Actually, Anderson says, in an ideal world he would prefer to offer it at an even steeper discount. The man who wrote “Free” would like to make Wired a freemium product: Offer some of the issue for no charge, and then upsell for the full thing.

“If there’s any one kind of tub I’m thumping, that’s the one,” he says. And then once again reminds us that he doesn’t control the magazine’s price. Noted!

Meanwhile, a few of the features to pay attention to:

• Clicking on a Web link–whether in an ad or on an editorial page–will now open up a Web page without kicking the user out of the app and into Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser.
• The app itself is now a free “wrapper” that you’ll use to purchase, view and store different issues of the magazine. If you purchased the first edition of the magazine and want to buy another one, you’ll have to go through the slightly cumbersome process of downloading the new app, then reloading the old issue back into the wrapper. There’s no cost to reload the issue, but it will take time, as it’s a really big file.
• The new issue isn’t quite as big as the old file, which came in at whopping 550 megabytes. The July app is a mere 340MB, but that’s in large part because the issue itself is smaller than the June issue. Condé and Adobe (ADBE), which is handling all of the technical heavy lifting on this, are going to have to figure out how to get the app much slimmer, or people won’t be able to subscribe to the thing.
• Subscriptions, social networking features and all sorts of other goodies are still on the drawing board.

Those are the sorts of price cuts you see with older phones, not newly launched ones. That we’re seeing discounts for the Kin so soon after its debut suggests that it’s not selling nearly as well as Microsoft and Verizon had hoped. Of course, neither Microsoft (MSFT) nor Verizon (VZ) will admit that. But the anecdotal evidence is pretty damning. As Ina Fried notes over at News.com, “A worker at one big-city Verizon Wireless store said the Kin is being outsold there not only by Droid smartphones, but also by older Palm Pre devices.”

The service, formerly a joint venture between RealNetworks (RNWK) and Viacom’s (VIA) MTV, has two new investors. Real and Viacom each own about 47.5 percent of the company, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group now owns a minority stake–something less than five percent. An undisclosed investor owns something much smaller than that.

Rhapsody’s managers will tell you that their new corporate structure gives them a better shot at turning around the music service, which has lost money for years and has recently been losing subscribers as well–it’s now down to 675,000. They predict they’ll generate $130 million in revenue this year and turn profitable by the end of 2010.

But consumers won’t care about any of that. The core question about them: Is there any amount of money they’re willing to pay for a monthly music subscription that lets them listen to whatever they want wherever they are?

Rhapsody’s price cut brings it in line with the $10-per-month offering Thumbplay announced earlier this year. If you want to spend less, both Best Buy’s (BBY) Napster and MOG offer $5 monthly subscriptions, but neither supports mobile phones (yet), so they’re only good for people who do most of their listening within earshot of their PCs.

Meanwhile Spotify, the music industry’s great European hope, has yet to make it to the U.S. despite many months of promises and negotiations. And lots of folks insist/believe/hope that Apple (AAPL) will eventually offer some sort of subscription service, or at least some kind of portable option that involves the cloud.

In the meantime, the overwhelming majority of people who do pay for music online do it in $1 increments. Apple is still selling some two billion songs a year via iTunes.

[Image credit: flattop341]

Of those, 58 percent said the iPad would replace Amazon’s (AMZN) device as their e-book reader.

And of the survey’s total respondents, 10 percent said they had considered buying a Kindle, but opted for an iPad instead. And 38 percent said they intended to read books on Apple’s (AAPL) new device (survey results below; click to enlarge).

Obviously, anecdotal information. That said, it would seem that the iPad is already taking e-book reader market share from the Kindle–or mindshare, anyway.

Will Amazon’s big hey-don’t-forget-Kindle homepage ads be enough to temper further cannibalization? Or will the company be forced to take more aggressive measures–a price cut perhaps? One that drops the Kindle to $149 from $259. As I wrote last week:

By widening the pricing gap between the two devices, Amazon might temper the maybe-I-should-just-spend-the-extra-money-and-get-the-iPad hesitancy that, let’s face it, a lot of potential Kindle buyers are probably already experiencing.

At $149, the Kindle as single-purpose reading device is a pretty compelling proposition, particularly given the selection advantage the Kindle store has over the iBook store. It’s an impulse buy.

At $259, it starts to become “half the money I need to buy an iPad.”