CyanogenMod Team Shows Ice Cream Sandwich Running on HP TouchPad

CyanogenMod 9 is creeping closer and closer to release, and we're seeing it running on more devices all the time - the first ones to get development builds were mostly Samsung phones, but a video has been posted of the Ice Cream Sandwich-based OS running on the HP TouchPad. This is the latest development in the Android-on-TouchPad saga, which began not a week after HP discounted the TouchPad and dumped all of its inventory.

Video playback and the front-facing camera are apparently not working yet, but otherwise the port seems to be running smoothly. As with the Gingerbread-based TouchPad CyanogenMod betas that have been floating around for awhile now, users can choose to dual boot their machines into either Android or WebOS.

CyanogenMod 9 is set to be officially released this month or next, and will eventually support almost everything currently supported by CyanogenMod 7. According to one of its developers, the CyanogenMod distribution currently boasts over one million active users.

Source: Android Community

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TouchDroid Project Dies, But Work Continues on Touchpad Android Port

The TouchDroid project, which was created just weeks ago in the wake of HP's Touchpad liquidation sale, has already disbanded. The project's discontinuation stems not from technical problems but because of accusations of code theft by the CyanogenMod team, which has also been working to bring Android to HP's defunct tablet.

After the TouchDroid team posted a video showing off the Touchpad running a touch-enabled install of Android 2.3, the CyanogenMod team accused TouchDroid team members of stealing code from the CyanogenMod port and passing it off as their own. In the end, the TouchDroid team gave the CyanogenMod team credit for its work, posted a dump of what they had done up to that point and declared that the team was "no longer actively working on a port" of Android to the Touchpad.

Meanwhile, the CyanogenMod team's work continues, and appears to be going well - at this writing, the only major component that doesn't appear to be functioning in their port is wi-fi, and at this rate I'd expect that to be fixed soon. In the meantime, you can read the Android Police report for a full description of the chat transcripts, forum posts, and tweets through which this drama unfolded.

Source: Android Police

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Swiftpoint’s New Mouse Leaves Your Touchpad Redundant

The people at New Zealand tech company Swiftpoint have been awful busy as of late developing the bane of laptop/notebook

everywhere: a miniscule new mouse you can grasp with three fingers or less. Oh, and it’s also called Swiftpoint.

What the Swiftpoint has over your average touchpad, those pesky little squares that allow you to hardly navigate a desktop, is performance plus utility. The left and right click buttons are arranged one on top of the other along the mouse’s spine.

The ergonomics of the device was so crafted that it’s grasped like a rather thick ball pen.Whether it’s the sheer cuteness or portability that has won you over, the Swiftpoint can he had for $69.95 over at Amazon.

You can also order it from the official site. Just don’t tell your touchpad, it might get jealous and plot revenge.

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HP's TouchPad at MWC 2011

 The Pre 3 felt very good and snappy. It's based on the highest clocked single-core ARM based SoC on the market today: Qualcomm's MSM8x55 running at 1.4GHz. Qualcomm mentioned that this is a standard part that's available to everyone - why HP ended up being the first to launch with it is unusual.One thing I did notice in using all of the devices is that there's still room for performance optimization. There are occasional slowdowns or dropped frames in the UI. The HP representative present indicated that there's still a great deal of work to be done on both the hardware and software side before the devices ship.  The TouchPad is by far the most interesting as webOS just begs to be used on a larger screen. The UI is smooth although again I saw some indications that HP needs to do more performance tuning. Given what we saw with the original Pre, I am concerned but we'll have to reserve judgement until final hardware hits the market. Performance optimizing can take a long time and we're still months away from a launch.   Check out the video above for a quick look at the HP TouchPad. ]]>

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HP Announces TouchPad, Veer and Pre 3: All Powered by Qualcomm

We're here at HP's webOS 2.1 event in San Francisco. HP has announced a couple of big things today; a tablet (HP TouchPad), a (tiny) smartphone (HP Veer) and a professional phone (the Pre 3), all running the webOS 2.1 operating system.

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