It's pretty unusual to see a fire sale for a brand new tablet, but that's exactly the route HTC took with its Nexus 9 today. Yes, just one day after it launched. The company quickly sold through a limited quantity of 16GB Nexus 9 tablets for $199 — half off the regular $399 price you'd pay at Google Play or Best Buy. That deal didn't last long, but other buyers saved $50 on either the 16GB or 32GB model while stock briefly remained available.

Today's big sale was the kickoff to HTC's "Hot Deals" promotion, which will happen every Tuesday starting now and continuing on for the next 9 weeks. That effectively covers the entire holiday shopping season, but we don't know what HTC has planned for next week's sale and beyond. Sorry, international buyers: the Hot Deals are only open to US customers.

There's a big question here, though: what about the people who already paid full price for a Nexus 9? Well, short of returning it and buying again, you're totally out of luck. That's a very raw deal for being an early adopter of Android 5.0, and we'd be curious to know how Google feels about this whole thing. For anyone that hadn't bought one yet, well, there was no better time than today. For $200, HTC's Nexus 9 is one heck of a product. You can check out our full review to make sure it's right for you.

Update 2:00PM ET: HTC almost instantly sold out of the $199 Nexus 9, and it's apparently also sold through its entire "limited quantity" stock for the $50 offer. Sorry, folks: this one's all over. But on the bright side, HTC says it's "working on something" for everyone that missed out.