HP's touchpad fire sale has been quite a phenomenon. The December edition of this sale brought so many people to ebay at a designated sale time that ebay completely broke with people going all the way through checkout just for the sale to not go through to ebay listing pages timing out. $100 for a tablet that is about the size of the ipad 1 but a bit more powerful and 1gb of RAM. What is the reason for such a failure? HP’s web OS simply lacks developer support. As an operating system it does a LOT of things quite well. I am working on putting together some web OS specific information that you’ll want to use since android may not ever be perfect on this device but at least it works good.
I have been enjoying my time with this tablet quite a bit and I’m ready to start sharing with you guys what I’m doing to get the most out of it. The version of Cyanogenmod 7.1.0 is called alpha 3.5. For those of you that can’t deal with some goofy things happening from time to time simply shouldn’t follow this guide.
A couple noteworthy bugs I’ve found
1) Sound disappears randomly after running a long time
2) Sound distorts when playing music if left to play music while I do other things
For the first one I just reboot it from time to time and for the second one I boot into webos when I want to leave it playing music for prolonged periods of time.
Before you do anything
1) Verify you have at least 2Gb of space available
2) be prepared for the POSSIBILITY of killing this shiny toy of yours. There is a pretty nice recovery tool HP has but you will lose all of the data on your touchpad.
Downloads you’ll need
1) Palm Novacom SDK - (Windows 64) (Windows 32)(Mac) (Linux)
2) AcmeInstaller
3) Moboot
4) Alpha 3.5 install file OR latest Xron file HERE ( I highly suggest the Xron )
5) Clockworkmod
6) Google apps
For the Palm webOS SDK make sure you click on custom installation and only select the command line tools.
Now that you have all of your files downloaded and ready to go it is time to plug the touchpad into your computer and push the USB drive button.
After the drive mounts open it and create a directory called cminstall and move all of those files you downloaded earlier into it EXCEPT ACMEinstaller.zip
.
Now that you've completed the PREP work you can eject the touchpad drive from your PC.
1) Hold the power button down and select shutdown.
2) After its shut down hold the power and volume up button until you see a giant USB symbol on the screen
3) Extract the contents of acminstaller.zip to wherever novacomd is which for me in 64 bit windows 7 is C:\Program Files (x86)\Palm\SDK\bin
4) Open a command prompt window and change to that directory you found in step 3
5) issue this command:
novacom.exe boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller
That will automate installing everything for you! This is amazingly simple and was by far the easiest massive mod I've ever done in my life. It'll run through things for a few minutes and eventually you'll be up and running with a dual booting android/web OS touchpad tablet.
Install Google Apps (optional
1) hold power until you get the option to reboot/shutdown
2) select reboot
3) select recovery
4) use the volume down button to scroll down to Install zip from SD card (select using the - looking button on the bottom
5) select choose zip from sdcard
6) browse to where the file is at in /cminstall and select to install it
7) Reboot and you're up
