IT’s that time again, TouchPad owners: break out the recoveries and clear your download queue. The CyanogenMod 9 developers have posted the latest build of Ice cream Sandwich for the HP TouchPad, this time getting it to the lofty heights of Alpha 1. There’s not a whole lot of differences between this and Alpha .6 a few weeks ago, but the addition of hardware-decoded video should be enough to get you excited. Power users, you know the drill: download the ROM from here, make a nandroid backup and flash. Hop to it.

The expanded video support is great for YouTube and local videos… and not much else. Reportedly Netflix isn’t working, which probably means that other video services like Hulu Plus and HBO Go are a wash as well. Other changes include slightly better touch responsiveness, plus some rendering enhancements using the hardware’s 2D graphics core. Other than that, you’ve still got all the good and bad of a ROM made for hardware that was never meant for it, most noticeably the camera, which still doesn’t work.

That said, the Ice Cream Sandwich build is getting closer and closer to daily driver status. Most of the little kinks have been worked out at this point, and remember that the build still allows you to reboot into the standard WebOS for some Palm nostalgia. Since HP gave the CyanogenMod team the code to their in-house Android kernel, the bugs left un the build should be getting fixed at an accelerated pace very soon. Oh, and the next release ought to have that nifty new boot animation, too…