Right about the time that HP ran its now legendary TouchPad fire sale, a few lucky customers received TouchPads inexplicably running Android. Apparently the PC manufacturer had been testing Gingerbread builds on its tablet (which runs Palm’s WebOS natively). As a show of solidarity to the development community, HP has now released the source code for its own internal version of the Android kernel to the CyanogenMod team. CyanogenMod maintains the most popular TouchPad Android port, CyanogenMod 7 Gingerbread, as well as the new CM9 Ice Cream Sandwich. You can read all the juicy details over at RootzWiki.
Giving away the kernel source is in addition to moving the entire WebOS software platform to an open source model, granting HP some very real cred with aftermarket developers and modders. Though the supply of retail TouchPads is now effectively zero, it’s still one of the most popular tablets out there for bargain hunters and techies. While not a supertablet by any means (it’s roughly the equal of the original iPad as far as specs go) it makes a fine start for Android enthusiasts looking to try out the tablet form factor.
What can the CyanogenMod team do with HP’s help? For starters, they’ll probably use the kernel to iron out some of the most consistent problems in their custom Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich builds, including HD video and camera issues. Past that, they should be able to make changes to CPU and memory handling for a smoother and more stable experience – not that the ROMs are particularly bad now. The Gingerbread ROM is currently at the Alpha 3.5 stage, while the ICS ROM is still on Alpha .6. Adventurous modders can flash the ROMs without affecting their current WebOS partitions.
kudo hp for the contrib.
Lol HP was confronted by lawyers to get this kernel out.. please post the whole Truth!
I believe the Touchpad had a dual core processor and the original iPad had 1 core. Also the Touchpad has the front facing camera while the iPad did not and I believe the TP has more RAM (although this one I am less sure about.) Anyway, while they both have the same screen resolution and similar dimensions, I don’t think it is fair to say it is the same hardware as an iPad. If it had a rear camera it would be like a fat, unoptimized iPad 2.
way more ram than ipad 1; 1gb vs 256mb.
Why do people even attempt posting about things they have absolutely zero knowledge about? This article is full of misinformation and plain BS!
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Its a great tablet. A dual core one having the same processor as many of the newer HTC and other devices using a dual core snapdragon processor at 1.5ghz (Evo 3D, Sensation, ect). Please please please, at least pull up a spec sheet net time man. :-
Yea the touchpad has better specs than ipad1, how are these moronic non-tech intelligent people allowed to write?
I get my android, iOS, webos news from real tech sites
Xda-developers
Tipb.com
Androidcentral.com
Per central.net
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