HP Touchpad (tablet) is not dead or bricked

It's a scary moment when you can't bring your device back to life. The fix on this page also worked on an old phone where the unit had overdischarged. The HP Touchpad has been incredibly reliable, but if it were to crash with the wireless still running, it's going to run down the battery to nothing, or worse over-discharge the battery. It can be brought to life in various ways below.

• Normal start - Press Power - but if it doesn't start
• Soft reset - Press Power + Home button for 10 to 60 seconds or
• Press Power + Volume up button for 60 seconds
• See other variations which people have reported at http://forums.webosnation.com

Of course  none of the above will work if there's no power in the unit. And there are situations where it's not possible to get power into the unit - possibly the unit has crashed and is stuck into a loop OR as someone suggested the unit has over discharged the battery. The solution was to change to a different charger. The normal HP Touchpad USB charger is more powerful than many. If you try a regular charger, the Touchpad may complain that it's not getting enough juice.  What fixed it was to use the low USB current from a desktop PC. Within a minute it was getting a trickle of energy and it could then be weaned back to its regular charging current.

I found the solution at WebOSnation and I have to thank the guy who, fearing the worst, took his apart to trickle charge the battery. Realising this was a last resort, I read more to find the guy suggesting the low current charger. I've tried something similar with a charging problem on a phone and the battery was totally flat. I removed the battery, connected the terminals to a Universal phone battery charger (a few £ on ebay). An hour or so later the old phone battery had enough juice to cope with a normal charge. 

A proper science explanation for this is welcome.

HP touchpad was bought for the ridiculously low price of £89 when HP's sold off the stock when after 6 weeks trading they realised that this was not going well. A year later (August 2012) it is able to dual-boot between Android ICS and WebOS. Android has the edge with tons of useful apps. To do the upgrade to Android see the help at liliputing.com. It is only a bit scary.