A collection of HP Touchpads were gathering dust before I rooted them and installed Android. Now, we're using them more than our laptops.
Readers of my column know that I have been a user of HP Touchpads ever since HP released/killed the devices and sold them in a fire sale. I bought four devices, one for everyone in my house, for the less than the price of one iPad.
After a few weeks however, my two sons and my wife stopped using their Touchpads. They became dust collectors, tossed onto a pile of discarded electronics. For me, I kept using my Touchpad occasionally. It was good for email and browsing the web. The Facebook app was fair, barely adequate even, but for occasional use it was fine. What really got me upset was that the Amazon Kindle app for WebOS was only a beta. It would frequently crash and stop running.
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Finally, after many months I took the plunge and rooted my touchpad, installing Android by CyanogenMod 9. The talented group of developers had developed an open Android distribution that would run on a wide variety of devices. Most of them were Android phones that were not officially upgrading to the latest Android version (even today only a small percentage of Android devices run Ice Cream Sandwich).
The CyanogenMod 9 ran so well on my Touchpad, I put it on the rest of the touchpads in my house as well. It revitalized my family’s use of our Touchpads. The kids loved having access to all of the games and apps in the Google Play Store. My wife rediscovered her pad, using it as her Facebook platform, reading in the Kindle app and lots of other good apps. Most recently the family discovered all of the Google Movie, Music and book choices, in addition to the apps.
In a family where devices have to fight for facetime (no pun intended to the Apple app), the kids were heavily using their tablets. Considering that they also have cellphones (one an iPhone, one an Android phone), iTouch, Nintendo 3DS, laptops, Xbox, Wii, etc, the fact that they would use their tablets so much was a real testament.
Perhaps the biggest endorsement, though, was how much I started using it. For as long as I can remember, my laptop is always on. Even when I sleep, my laptop is usually at the side of the bed. Whether I get up in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning, I instinctively check my email and other communications. Now, my laptop stays off most nights, packed away. I have my pad nearby and that is my go-to device. I run Netflix on it for movies, read my news, social media stuff and just about anything I would do on my laptop.
The choices for my Touchpad just got a lot deeper too. The developers at CyanogenMod 9 just released theofficial RC of their version. Up until now I have been updating here and there on from the nightly versions that the team releases. Some of those releases are better than others. With the RC version, the team feels that this is a stable and functionally competitive version. I can tell you that over the last few weeks a lot of the bugs have been squashed. The microphone now works. The only major piece that is still missing is the camera on my Touchpad is still not enabled. From what I understand, cameras on many of the devices that CyanogenMod 9 is running on don’t work either. But I don’t see it as a big problem.
All in all, I am really thrilled with the great work of the CyanogenMod 9 team. I just can’t believe how well the Touchpad runs on this software. Also, kudos to Google for developing ICS. Great OS, great experience for a tablet.
If that wasn’t enough good news though, it got even better today. The first community edition of WebOS was released too. This version is really aimed at developers, to give them access and show them how they can develop better, more powerful applications in WebOS. It is in anticipation of the Open WebOS 1.0 being released in September. That is what I am really waiting for. Of course, it remains to be seen if the opening of WebOS will attract a larger set of apps and developers than just the dedicated core group that the old Palm/WebOS had before. But I am ever the optimist. It would be great to have a new, revitalized WebOS and a fully functional Android system to choose from for my Touchpad. Better yet, they are both open source!
You may ask how I’m going to use two OS at the same time? Easy, CyanogenMod installs as a dual boot on the Touchpad. So I can boot from one to the other quickly and easily. It really does allow me to have my cake and eat it too.
