First of all, I would like to say RIP, WebOS. You had no chance. If you haven’t heard by now, HP has decided to kill off their WebOS hardware business, meaning that they will discontinue the Touchpad Tablet and the Palm Pre and Pixie phones. But this post isn’t about that. For more information about the death of WebOS, you can read this great article over at AllThingsD.
HP has decided to get rid of their remaining inventory of TouchPad tablets, and to do so, they lowered the price of the 16GB model to $199 and the 32GB model to $150. These things were selling like hotcakes. Online and at brick and mortar location. I was able to get mine at a local hhgregg store. Others were lucky to get their hands on one at their local Staples, Office Depot, Target, and other locations.
For $99, the TouchPad has excellent hardware. It features a 9.7-inch display, 1GB of RAM, 16 or 32GB of internal storage, 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, and much more. While many bought the discontinued $99 tablet simply to use as a tablet, many, like myself, bought the tablet for other plans, specifically to later put Android on it at some point in the future.
Now that the TouchPad has become the cheapest tablet available, many Android enthusiasts are hoping for it to run Android at some point in the future. As a matter of fact, a project to get Android running on the Touchpad is already underway by team TouchDroid, a team of developers who are not new to porting Android onto new devices. The team consists of Thomas Sohmers (@trsohmers), @Framework43, John Hale (@rhcp011235), and Jacob Bell (@ProTekk).
By the look of things, the project is going well and the guys are hard at work making this a reality. There’s no ETA, so just hang in there and know that a wonderful group of people are working hard to make this a reality. Make sure that you follow the four developers above, and also @HPTouchDroid. There is also a thread going on at RootzWiki that you can take a peak at for more information. If you prefer IRC, you can join the development fun at #Touchdroid on freenode.
So, if you bought a TouchPad with hopes of Android running on it in the future, sit back, relax, and hopefully we’ll hear some good news from the Touchdroid team. Until them, enjoy the Touchpad for what it does best, web browsing and Hulu!
Source: @Trsohmers
