An Android port for the Touchpad has just started development | Hacker News Reader

An Android port for the Touchpad has just started development

touch-droid.com

51 pointssrik24 comments

I'm all for hey-why-not geek cred, but the reason for getting a Touchpad is WebOS. There is nothing intrinsically special about the hardware that deserves Android (except that it is cheap right now).

I'd be more impressed with figuring a way to get WebOS onto other devices.

>There is nothing intrinsically special about the hardware that deserves Android (except that it is cheap right now).

Isn't that just it though?

>I'd be more impressed with figuring a way to get WebOS onto other devices.

One set of fingers is crossed for open source webOS. The other is for boot2gecko to replace it entirely. Web Intents can serve as Android intents and we can have the richness and ease of webOS and free cross-platform web apps.

I think that the reason for getting the Touchpad has changed significantly with the price drop to $100.

But just to push your point a bit, what do you like so much about WebOS that you'd like it on other devices?

The. Intrinsicly special aspect of the hardwareis that there's a fire sale going on right now at bestbuy. A solid middle of the road android (probably soon enough) tablet for one hundred bucks is a solid acquisition.

just picked up one this weekend, some reasons are:

1. WebOS international support is terrible. This is a huge reason to get Android on it. They've completely ignored it.

2. The browser while good, the card system is slow when trying to use it as a tabbed browser. Opening a new link in a new card is quite slow. I don't care for app support because their browser is good, but if you are going to rely on the browser at least have a decent tabbed browser. Look at Dolphin browser on Android to see how a mobile browser should be done. Also another limitation seems to be I can't download files from the browser ex dropbox.

3. Overall the system feels sluggish. Android has multitasking right, WebOS doesn't. After the Android team optimizes and overclocks this hardware, I imagine its going to be pretty good.

4. Lack of Customization, I can't even make a picture fullscreen wallpaper on the background. And since you can't place anything on the desktop/wall area.. a nice big picture would look good.

Overall its solid and feels polished, but WebOS is overall really lacking and compared to Honeycomb I don't see it as better. The best thing is flash support works great, and I can watch all the media I want from streaming flash sites. The biggest benefit is getting honeycomb/Ice cream sandwich on a solid tablet for $100.

I'm actually getting one hoping that android will be ported to it soon. Then I have a cheap tablet with great hardware. Sure webOS is decent upon release, but it'll take a long time to achieve the kind of open source dev community that android has if it was open sourced, so there'll be an initial slump in development efforts. Plus, without official support (nor commercial success), the market place will be a ghost town.

It's a $100 "high-end" tablet, that you can use as your own Android tablet. Why the heck not? You won't find Android tablets of that performance and quality for that price.

> There is nothing intrinsically special about the hardware that deserves Android (except that it is cheap right now).

That's exactly what makes it special. And that's whats important to most of the buyers, I imagine.

I picked up two TouchPads this weekend for my wife and I (but also spent half my weekend tracking them down). I really like the hardware and webOS for browsing, facebook and email but the app selection is severely lacking.

I would LOVE to put Android on it for the apps but have doubts that it will come to fruition. There's an influx of new TouchPad users but it's reached it's peak and can only go down from here.

I am a little puzzled by this project because: a) there was a recent post on techcrunch about how webos runs twice as fast on a hacked ipad, how the hardware isn't that great at all and how this was a pretty widespread belief in the HP team b) android hardware is evolving very very fast These two observations would suggest that by the time android is ported to the touchpad it will be an obviously obsolete piece of unsupported hardware

Just picked up my own Touchpad from Barnes and Noble ($100, 16GB) and look forward to hacking around with it.

Have you got yours? If I go to 'my account' there it says 'unable to process order'.

I ordered mine (without using a B&N account) an hour ago, and it went fine: Email receipts and everything! Check with your bank to make sure it's not a problem on your side.

I wish there was a port to ExoPC. I have one laying around, completely useless.

Why is it useless? According to the specs you should be able to run Windows 7 on it. Of course, maybe that's exactly why it's useless.

Their first blog post is far, far, far from hope inspiring. http://www.touch-droid.com/2011/08/21/who-we-are/ (Edit) And indeed the sight of a certain username causes me to be very unsurprised.

I'm curious to know how they will deal with all the hardware drivers for the Touchpad-specific hardware. I'm not keeping my hopes up. I'd be more interested in people making tweaked/customized WebOS ROMs for it.

I assumed with the kernel sources available and access to the drivers available on current Touchpad ROMs, that that wouldn't be the hardest part of it, but I don't know what work it takes to get those drivers and kernel to work with Android.

Obviously fueled by HP's deep price cut, hope the momentum keeps going after HP runs out of the stock.

I'd be more impressed getting linux to run on all of the above. Touchpad, android phones, toasters, etc.

why have a dumbed down version where you must either a) have no control to menial tasks like editing /etc/hosts or gasp opening an ssh session; b) let any app do as it whish with your data

I used to run linux with window maker on a 386 compaq portable. 1/100 of the cpu of my phone. 1/3 of the screen pixel of my nexus one.

get away with those toy OSes. Enough is enough.

You can run Ubuntu on a TouchPad. See http://webos-internals.org/ for how.

I think you don't know what are you talking about: Android is linux and you can edit /etc/hosts as you wish.

You can even get in an ssh session as simple as an app...

And for b) : what an app can do is stated before install. "English, my friend. Do you speak it?" (Or any other language fyi)

in another thread i'm downvoted when people says that multiuser is essential for a desktop and i call it a minor annoyance for 99% of the setups.

here i'm downvoted because i want multiused on my mobile stuff.

And if you blindly trust android control model, i'm sorry. The non-rooted ROMs google distribute over the air has some sandboxing control but then your launcher and every other program is boxed out of basic functionality, such as editing /etc/hosts and running ssh or loading a tun driver. If you allow your stuff to run 'as root' then you can't believe any app until you coded it yourself --which is fine with me, this worked well on the PC.

you can edit hosts without root with adb, if you don't want to root. If you want to live in a post-pc world you can simply grant root privileges to one single app for one single session...

I bet that if you don't trust any app on the market, you can simply write one for yourself, pay someone to write one or find one that is open source (and pay someone to audit it) and build it+sideload that app on your phone. Too complicated? Sure it is. Make your trade off

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