CMTouchpad – The day you’ve been waiting for!
Anyone heard of a HP Touchpad? Of course you have! After the recent fire sale by HP many have managed to snap up these tablets at ridiculously cheap prices… and now things just got even better!
You may have heard by now that the day many have waited for, finally arrived today. Yes, the first public release of CyanogenMod for the HP Touchpad “Alpha 1 – Lower your expectations”.
Having installed this as soon as I possibly could, I thought i would give you my thoughts In case you were not sure about doing it for yourself.
First a few notes: Obviously you do all this at your own risk and I wont go into the why’s and wherefores of installing as that’s all covered in the RootzWiki Forums HERE.
Its fully explained that there are bugs, but from what I’ve found so far, there are very few that really effect usage.
I Also apologise for some of the poor pictures, I quickly snapped as I was installing! 
BIG PLUS! This is a DUALBOOT INSTALL… so you can still boot into WebOS by hitting the power button and selecting “Reboot into WebOS.” Fantastic… the best of both!
So, once you follow the instructions, which basically entails adding 4 zip files (CWM, moboot, Gapps and the CM payload) to a directory called “cminstall” on your TP’s internal memory, and then running the installer (yes, they really have made it that simple!) you are greeted with pages and pages of text, No need to panic, this is basically the ACME installer doing its stuff. Shortly after you will get a couple of loading screens and then a CyanogenMod splash screen… Wow that was quick!
Now the real fun begins…. you are greeted (I believe, if you installed Gapps like I did) with the “Welcome To HP TouchPad” Screen where its time to add your Google account etc.. Once completed you’re in! Welcome to CM7 – Android 2.3.7 on Touchpad! 
As I had also included Gapps, I thought first port of call would be the market. It looks very good, and is sort of a cross between the new phone market and the Honeycomb market, it obviously adapts to the larger screen size. No problems there. Next up, i installed ADW EX. The icons became a lot larger, and gave it more of a pad feel, rather than the small icons from the bundled ADW. Its worth noting at this point that i tried to use the theme chooser in CM, and on ADW, and things went a bit wrong. so approach theming with caution!
Heres a few screenshots of my home screen, once i had finished playing around.
Then i set about installing some apps. Anything i could think of really, So heres a few that i tried… and I’m glad to say, didn’t have a problem with any really.
SpeedX 3D works fine, and so does Peggle (sorry no screeny of that)
Next i though i would try Cordy, as that’s quite an intensive 3D experience, and it coped with that fine too. Very impressive.
Pulse News worked flawlessly, as does the Land of Droid app
A shots of the Market app too. in portrait, almost like the Honeycomb version. I had to install Google Maps from the APK file directly, as it doesn’t show in the market. But it seems to work fine.!
And Finally.. an app i suggest all tablet owners try… Thumb Keyboard. Works perfectly on touchpad, really quite impressed with it.
I tried LOTS of apps, and games, and didn’t have a problem with any apart from Kindle. i couldn’t seem to get the text size small enough for a whole page to fit on the screen, so a tiny dot was missing from the bottom. but this is probably app related.
The only other bug i noticed. (after successfully installing Google Music) was that the speakers don’t mute when you plug in your headphones. which I’m sure will be fixed soon.
So YES, Its an Alpha, but is more like a Beta version, its almost there.. but if you are not sure, i would say go for it anyway. :-) i don’t think you will be disappointed.
Oh, and AngryBirds works perfect too!! lol
Kudos to the CyanogenMod Team, and all the Devs involved at RootzWiki for taking all this time and effort to bring us Android on Touchpad. They have done a marvellous job so far. Please support if you can.
On behalf of the Android community, We salute you!