About 6 months ago I was walking through the city, and saw via a tech mag tweet that HP was going to be selling its $500 Touchpad tablet device for $99, due to the lack of sales in the USA. Not owning a tablet of any flavour at that point, I ran straight to the nearest Harvey Norman in Martin place to try and secure me one of these suckers. I missed out. However, my dear mother had a day off work so I sent her down to the local Harvey Norman where she picked me up a shiny new 16gb model. Woohoo! Now, what would I do with it? The Touchpad actually turned out To be a pretty nifty device.....once it was jail broken, over clocked and tuned up a bit. Without these modifications, the device was sluggish, unpolished and it didn't seem like a finished device. To be honest though, the temptation and real reason for buying the Touchpad was the thought of being able to install Google Android on it. This would open up a world of apps just not available in WebOS land and hopefully make the now discontinued Touchpad a new lease on life. I just needed someone to do a port of Android and I'd be good to go! A group called Cyanogenmod Team took up the challenge and began working on a Gingerbread build of Android for the Touchpad. I resisted installing this as I had heard that there was a build of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) in the works, which promised greater usability and performance than the old Gingerbread build. To cut a long story short, Cyanogenmod 9 was released earlier in the year and the time came this Easter weekend to get it onto the Touchpad. I grabbed the required files from Rootzwiki, checked and double checked the instructions and went for it. After a false start, ICS was on the Touchpad. How would it work though? After a straight forward setup process where I setup my Gmail account and tablet settings, Android came to life. It c retained looked good, applications seemed to be in place and even the Google Play store was up and running. The learning curve however was going to be a little different to the IOS environment I was now used to. The fluidity of the OS was great, taking advantage of the snappy HP 1.2ghz processor installed in the Touchpad. Browsing was a good experience with no problems loading pages, however many pages displayed as the "mobile" version rather than the full experience which was frustrating and unnecessary from time to time. Email was accessed through the Gmail app and worked great. The Play store gave me access to many of the apps I was used to on the iPhone and iPad and downloading them was a straight forward process. Stick Cricket was always signalled out as the big test of the device. Could Android play it as well as on IOS? The short answer was yes, the experience was very similar to IOS. I knew that the camera wasn't working in this release, but didn't mind that. Other than this, I still haven't found too much that hasn't worked well. The big let down however is in the apps available to Android tablets. There simply aren't that many and those that ar, are generally formatted for mobile phone screens and stretched for the larger screen. Compared to the offerings for iPad, this is the Achilles heel of android tablets. It's disappointing. Very disappointing. Overall though, I'm happy. I have a $99 tablet running the latest Google OS that is a very usable device. Is it as good as an iPad? No, however it's close. Apple's closed system does shine when it comes to the tablet environment in a way that Android is yet to match. Once tablet hardware reaches the magic $199 mark which has been slated by Asus and Google, Android will be a formidable alternative to iPad and IOS. For the time being though Apple still holds the crown in the tablet wars.
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