Yesterday we posted about a report saying that the HP TouchPad was second in sales only to the iPad (thanks to a $99/$149 firesale, of course). Given the work that the CyanogenMod team has been doing to port Android over to the TouchPad, the Touchpad could be the most popular Android tablet (if all TouchPad owners loaded CM7 onto their devices, which I know is unlikely)! But enough making huge leaps in logic and jumping to a stretch of a conclusion… The big news is that an Alpha 3 version of CyanogenMod 7.1 is available for HP TouchPad hackers to install onto their devices.
As the CyanogenMod team has said repeatedly, these builds still have several bugs, but they gave in and made the alpha builds available since so many people were clamoring to try it out themselves. This Alpha 3 version has quite a few fixes in it. Here’s the change log from the RootzWiki thread:
* Last prominent form of “sleep of death” fixed
* Webkit backing store(smoother scrolling)
* Minor improvements to 2D/3D performance in some apps
* Bluetooth DPad/arrows do not rotate with screen
* Battery stats now available to Android
* Serial# now populated
* Shorter hostname as a result of serial#
* General wifi fixes
* Preliminary Touchpad 4G support(no radio)
* Status bar should take less resources after an app goes full screen
* Possible fix for A2DP and wifi interference
* Possible fix for SD card not mounting
* Camera FPS improved but still nearly nonfunctional
If you already have CM7.1 Alpha 2 and ClockworkMod Recovery installed on the TouchPad, this upgrade will be quite easy, because you can just go to the discussion thread on the RootzWiki forum and download the .zip for the Alpha 3 directly to your TouchPad. Then reboot into ClockworkMod Recovery to install the upgrade straight from the .zip file. Brad Linder from Liliputing has put together a video demonstrating this, which can be seen below.
If you don’t yet have any form of CM7.1 installed on your TouchPad, you can hit up the link below to Liliputing’s guide that will walk you through the process. You’ll have to install ACMEInstaller from the CyanogenMod team on your PC, and connect the TouchPad via USB to do the initial install. And you can do this with the Alpha 3 build; you don’t have to start with Alpha 1 and upgrade.
But wait, there’s more!
There is another RootzWiki thread where developer “fattire” has shown some very, very preliminary work on porting Ice Cream Sandwich to the TouchPad! Right now he’s stuck at the lock screen because the touchscreen is not yet functional, so obviously there’s a long way to go.
But how cool is that to think that sometime in a few months, you could be running Ice Cream Sandwich on your HP TouchPad? Very cool.
Via Liliputing
