Android port for HP TouchPad making progress

Android 2.3 with multi-touch support on the HP TouchPad tablet
Source: Team-TouchDroid After the recent fire sale of the HP TouchPad tablet, hackers and modders quickly began work on porting Google's open source Android mobile operating system to the device and they are making progress. The developers at Team-Touchdroid have already succeeded in replacing WebOS, which is the tablet's default OS, with version 2.3.5 of Android.

The team's latest status post includes a video of working touchscreen drivers, with support for 10-finger multi-touch; the project had previously succeeded in booting Android but were unable to use the device's 9.7-inch (1024×768) display. Once the Android 2.3.x "Gingerbread" port has reached a functional and 'stable' beta state, the TouchDroid community plans to begin work on a full Honeycomb (Android 3.x) port. A dual-boot option to allow users to choose between WebOS and Android is already in development.

The developers at CyanogenMod, best known for their custom Android ROMs/firmware, have also been working on installing Android on the HP TouchPad; a video of CyanogenMod 7 booting is available on YouTube. Another project has also successfully installed Ubuntu Linux on the tablet, however, not all of the bundled applications function as the device has an ARM-based processor and they haven't been compiled for ARM.

See also:

• Modders offer bounty for HP TouchPad Android port, a report from The H.

(crve)