HP developed the TouchPad tablet and released it around seven weeks ago. Since then the device has been slashed in price many times in the last month. In the last 72 hours customers have been ravenous for it due to the fact HP has a fire sale. The tablets that used to cost $500 are now being sold for $99.99 and over 400,000 have been sold in the last 48 hours. HP has discontinued manufacturing the tablet and is restructing their company to not sell any computers anymore. The TouchPad is the first tablet running WebOS and now that HP is not going to be developing it, customers want an alternative.
A dedicated crew of Android developers are working on a port to bring Android 2.3 and then Honeycomb to the TouchPad. The new project is dubbed “Touch Droid” and has 5 people working on the port right now.
The first build of the Android on the TouchPad will be AOSP based and then once a stable version is running they are going to gravitate it towards the standard CM7 base. Once they open up the Beta and work out the bugs they will be quickly porting it over to Honeycomb. Google 3.0 will make the device will really shine and take advantage of all the features of the webOS iteration.
You can check out the main website in development HERE and the master forum thread HERE.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
