HP could have had a hit in their hands with the HP TouchPad but sad to say, this did not happen. Poor app support and strong competition from other slates led to the early demise of the HP tablet which already got discontinued before it even had the chance to make it big. In fact, HP conducted several Fire Sales just to get rid of the remaining HP TouchPad tablets in its inventory.
If you happen to be one of those who managed to snag an HP TouchPad in one of the Fire Sales last year, there is a big chance that your tablet may already be collecting dust under the bed especially that the tablet will no longer get some Open webOS update love. But if you have been following the news, you certainly came across the report back in the day that you can actually get rid of webOS and install Android on the HP TouchPad for that matter. In fact, the HP TouchPad already got a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, unofficially of course, but apparently, things do not end there.
As it stands, the HP TouchPad also got an unofficial taste of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the latest iteration of the Android mobile operating system. Ironic isn’t it, that while high-end Android smartphones and tablets are waiting to get a tasty treat of Jelly Bean, yet we see the HP TouchPad, a device running an entirely different operating system, get treated to an unofficial Jelly Bean build?
The Jelly Bean treat on the HP TouchPad is courtesy of the fellows behind CyanogenMod 10. The early build of CM10 for the tablet was leaked by James Sullin so even if your HP TouchPad will no longer get upgraded to the latest webOS version, it will at least get a taste of THE latest Android version.
The key word here though is “early build” so a lot of things are still now working on the HP TouchPad as expected. According to the developers, video acceleration, mic and sound on the tablet are not working as of the moment. Also, a lot of apps sometimes force close or are not working altogether. Despite this, the build has great potential and developers are all in agreement that a fairly stable build of Jelly Bean, one that can be used as a daily driver, will come out in the future.
As for the ill-fated HP TouchPad, a QualComm APQ8060 SnapDragon chipset gives the tablet dual-core capabilities via its dual-core Scorpion processor running at 1.2 GHz. A full gigabyte of RAM lends support to the processor for a smooth performance on the tablet while its storage space ranges from 16GB to 32GB. Its display is an LED-backlit LCD panel that has a diagonal of 9.7 inches and resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. it only has one shooter though in the form of its front-facing 1.3MP camera for video calling purposes.
