Now that HP is liquidating its stock of TouchPad tablets with a "fire sale" which initially kicked off on Friday evening (instead of dumping them all in a landfill), what will consumers actually do with their new $100 tablet? The good news is that HP plans to continue support for both models, offering updates to the webOS system when needed.
But for those who don't want webOS on the device, there's even more good news: a port of Google 3.x "Honeycomb" is on the way. The project is in the good hands of the RootzWiki-based collective which aims to keep the project "as open as possible."
According to this post, the first step will be to build with Gingerbread following the Android Open Source Project. Once the team is able to boot the device using Gingerbread, they'll switch over to CyanogenMOD CM7 and continue on until a stable beta is reached. After that, they will continue to provide bug fixes for the Gingerbread build, but also begin working on a full Honeycomb port.
"If Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) is released before or during our development of the Honeycomb port, we will stop and begin work on ICS," the Touchdriod team states. Thomas Sohmers, one of the developers behind the project, also adds that they plan to have "a screen based button system similar to Honeycomb within Gingerbread."
To keep uo with the porting progress, head here. The group is also accepting donations via PayPal just in case someone accidentally bricks their TouchPad tablet in the process or if one needs to be taken apart for any reason.
