If you are an owner of the HP TouchPad you probably know by now that HP has decided to kill off the webOS slate, so where does that leave you? Well basically up the tablet creek, but as my colleague Mark recently suggested, what the HP TouchPad needs is a taste of Android, and it appears that this could now happen.
According to an article over on Ubergizmo by way of Android Central, a team of guys at Rootzwiki also think the HP TouchPad needs Android and thus has started Touchdroid, a project to bring Android to the aforementioned slate.
Apparently the team is hoping to port Android 2.3 Gingerbread over to the TouchPad as the Android 3.0 Honeycomb code isn’t yet available to the public, and the process of actually porting Android to the TouchPad will obviously take some time, but at least someone is working on the task, but whether they will accomplish that remains to be seen.
According to the article some have asked whether the HP TouchPad will be able to dual boot due to webOS being a “pretty neat” UI, but the guys have said although they are not against a dual boot, it isn’t a priority.
No doubt many adopters of the HP TouchPad were annoyed when HP announced the demise of the slate and webOS, and further salt was rubbed into the wound when HP slashed the price of the webOS slate down to $99 right after, however according to the article, early adopters will apparently receive a partial refund to alleviate the price difference.
And that’s about it; all we know is the Touchdroid Project team exists, they are attempting to port Android Gingerbread to the device and once they successfully boot Android they will move to a CM7 base.
So there you have it HP TouchPad users, HP may have decided to kill off your tablet and operating system but at least now you know someone has stepped up to the mark and hopes to save the tablet by delivering Android at some point in the future.
Just how long that will take is anyone’s guess, by as soon as we hear more on the Touchdroid project we will of course pass it along.