After thousands of people grabbed an HP TouchPad for a bargain basement price over the last month, CyanogenMod have been hard at work to get Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) working on the device and they are very nearly there.
In just a few weeks the team has managed to get the touchscreen, WiFi, and audio fully functioning, as well as enabling Android to make use of both 1.2Ghz cores of the TouchPad’s Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. They’ve also added support for hardware-accelerated video allowing users to watch 720p HD video, as well as for the WebOS file system, which means that you can dual boot Android and WebOS on the same device.
The TouchPad may not be the slim and superfast Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or an iPad, but it still measures up pretty impressively with its other competitors – and adding support for Android and its huge collection of apps will only improve it.
Do note, however, that this port is only for Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) and not the latest Honeycomb (3.2) version that was designed directly for tablets – as Google is yet to release the source code of that version of their “open source” operating system. We will hope that CyanogenMod will do their thing with that version as well though when it is allowed into the wild of course!
Here’s a video of Android gaming on the TouchPad from CyanogenMod: