You Got An HP TouchPad! …Now What? An After-Firesale Review

Thousand of us grabbed HP TouchPads this weekend while the getting was good! And if you’re anything like me, you were excited, played with it, explored what it had to offer, tried some apps… and then thought.. ok, now what?

Well, we have a pretty good tablet that’s been discontinued and will no longer be supported. We have on it an operating system that will probably never be updated. hp-touchpadAnd the small app market we got with it, that’s going to remain small.

We have all discovered that the HP TouchPad is lacking some features which HP should have known to include. Things like a slot for an SD memory card would have been really handy, along with more ports. We were disappointed when we found that Netflix is not supported. And we were surprised to find that the HP TouchPad, with it’s WebOS, is quite sluggish at times. Now that we have used one, it’s not hard to understand why the TouchPad did not sell well in it’s original $499 to $599 price range.

But now we are getting the TouchPad priced from $99 to $149, depending on the size of the hard drive.

And at that price – well heck – we’ve got ourselves a fast, powerful tablet, full of great features and apps (again, keeping the price in mind). As is, and for that price, we got a steal.

But that’s not the end of the story – we also got ourselves a really cheap tablet that is full of POTENTIAL!

How’s that? A discontinued tablet, and discontinued operating system, that’s full of potential?

Yes – at least two groups are working on a plan that would allow us to put the Android operating system onto the HP TouchPad. One is being done by a team at rotzwiki.com. It is being called the TouchDroid. The other team is working on the same thing over at xda-developers.com.

If they can accomplish their goal, then we could put the – very – supported, fast, full featured, Android operating system, with tons of apps, on our 1.2GHz Snapdragon dual-core processor HP TouchPads. And that should make for a pretty cool machine!

—-correction—-

What appeared to be two groups working on a way to port Android over to an HP TouchPad is actually one group moving from one development site to another. They are setting up their new site and posting updates at touch-droid.com – ed


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Author Profile: Consumer Expert Faroh Sauder

Faroh Sauder has spent more than 30 years working as a journalist and educator. He has written on politics, international affairs, civil rights, and consumer education.

Now mostly retired, Faroh continues to stay current on tech and consumer issues and reports on his interests here at Consumer Press

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