My Touchpad has landed!!

I was one of the lucky ones that managed to somehow score a HP Touchpad during the firesale for a low low price of $99. Then the wait began. First Amazon cancelled a bunch of orders but I was still safe. Then when it was about to ship Hurricane Irene blew through and all mail in my area stopped! So finally today my HP Touchpad arrived. I know alot of people are saying why buy this tablet and what are you going to do with it now?

I have been wanting to purchase a tablet but with a nice laptop and a Android phone it is hard to justify spending $400+ on a tablet. However $99 I can definitely handle. Now I have a 10" tablet with a dualcore processor, front facing camera and Flash support. Yes there is no rear facing camera but who is really running around taking pictures with their tablet? And yes HP has walked away from webOS so further support is sketchy at best, although rumors are floating around of Samsung being interested in the OS which could make things interesting. The Android developer community however, is not going to let this tablet go quietly into the night and that was a big reason in my purchase.

RootzWiki has an entire team working on porting Android to the Touchpad( it helps that is is running the internals as many Android tablets) with the plan being to first get Gingerbread up and running and then jump on the Honeycomb bandwagon. Then the big news, some of the greatest minds in Android the team behind CM7 have thrown their hat in the ring and are working hard at getting Cyanogen running. They even have a video showing the tablet booting up but that is about all. I myself am a big fan of webOS so I would love a dualboot option where I can keep both OS's on the tablet. Stay tuned as I will be writing about my experience getting my Touchdroid up and running!!!

JKeene AndroREV Writer

We Are AndroREV, WE ARE!!!

HP to make more Touch Pads?

So HP has seen the light and decided to make one final run of TouchPads to help meet demand. These extra pads will reportedly appear in the next few weeks and honeslty I have to say I'm quite pleased with the decision and not because I'm excited to see Cyanogen Mod running on a WebOS tablet but because I'm still kind of excited about WebOS. There are still good people very dedicated to the WebOS software platform not to mention HP themselves who have not abandoned software at all only hardware production (there seems to be some confusion about this.) Perhaps I will get my hands on one this time around. One thing we don't know is exactly how many they will produce.

Kidromulous
AndroREV
We Are Androrev WE are!

JKeene Editorial, "The Demise of WebOS and Why I bought the Touchpad

I have spent the last week following the news of the demise of webOS like many of you out there. Then came the news of the HP Touchpad firesale in which the Touchpad would be reduced hundreds of dollars to liquidate supplies. HP was closing shop on webOS after just purchasing it for $1.2 BILLION just last year. Everyone out there was buying Touchpads for $99 myself included. Before we talk tablets, what happened to the OS I knew and loved? Where did Palm go wrong?

Palm was founded in 1992 with the idea of making PDA's for consumers. Their first attempt, the Zoomer was a complete failure but the company stayed alive through various ways and was bought and sold by a number of companies during the rest of the decade. In 2000 the company went public but found itself in an odd position of having the hardware being produced by one company,palmOneInc and the software being made by Palmsource. These companies merged in 2005 and continued to produce PDA's until 2008. At CES 2009 Palm announced that they would be stepping into the mobile phone OS game with the creation of webOS and the Palm Pre. While the Pre became the fastest selling phone in Sprint's history at the time(until the Evo came along) overall it was a failure. Blackberry was the business end of smart phones, iphone had sex appeal, and Android everything in between. This left the Pre and Palm out in the cold, not to mention a marketplace with only 1500 apps. Palm was dying a slow death and was bought out by HP. This was quite a gamble by HP but they went from having nothing in the Smartphone game to having an established name in one fell swoop. This marriage did not last long as HP has just announced that they will be closing shop on their new mobile OS and with it will webOS finally meet it's maker?

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, back to the tablet. I have always wanted a tablet but with both a laptop and an Android phone I have had a hard time justifying both the price and the need for a tablet. But who really NEEDS a tablet? It is a luxury item and one I freely admit to wanting! Along comes a very nice 10" tablet for $99? Now you are talking! The HP Touchpad comes backing dualcore 1.5GHz Qualcomm processors and a tablet version of my old friend webOS. But this is an Android site you say! Don't worry Andy is going to find his way onto this Touchpad! A large number of developers out there are hard at work to port Android OS to the HP Touchpad. After seeing Android on everything from Iphones to Windows phones this is certainly not impossible. An entire crew of Developers are hard at work over at Rootzwiki with a plan to create TouchDroid! The plan is to get Gingerbread up and running in Beta then its on to Honeycomb. I will be following this project closely and don't worry readers you will be along for the ride as I aim to fire up the best performing lowest priced Android tablet ever!!! Stay tuned for more!

Editors Note: In the panel on the right you will see the Revolutionary Forum! Please sign it if you bought a touchpad and tell us what model and how much you payed for it! -Kid

JKeene

We are AndroREV, We Are!!!!