Android on the HP Touchpad
Most of you have probably heard that HP has discontinued all of their webOS devices and followed up their announcement by discounting their just released Touchpad tablet to $99-$149, depending on the amount of flash installed.
This spurred unprecedented demand for these discounted Touchpads. I was able to order a 32GB model directly from HP and I have several friends who have one or more of these Touchpads coming. The HP website currently shows my Touchpad will ship on 8/30/2011. I am not holding my breath, however.
The Touchpad hardware is state of the art, sporting a dual core Qualcomm APQ8060 processor capable of running at up to 1.5Ghz per core, with integrated Adreno video support, which can natively decode 1080p video without using the main processor.
The TP also has a nice 1024x768 capacitive multitouch touchscreeen, screen facing camera with integrated SKYPE support, an onboard GPS, a built in gyroscope, magnetometer and accelerometer, WiFi and Bluetooth support, and Dolby speakers built in.
The biggest liability of the TP is that it uses webOS, which is SERIOUSLY LACKING in application support.
The obvious solution to this problem is to port Android to the touchpad, which would instantly double it’s value and quite frankly make alot of people that bought these VERY happy.
Normally, the Android build for a device is done by the manufacturer, who has complete details on the hardware, I/O ports, memory mapping, etc of the device. This is what makes this port especially difficult, as HP has not disclosed any details on the hardware interfaces of the Touchpad. This is compounded by the fact that the Touchpad is so far the ONLY released consumer device to use the Qualcomm APQ8060 processor, which means we can’t “borrow” code from another device.
In the midst of this, at least one Touchpad purchaser seems to have received their TP with Android 2.2.1 (Froyo) installed on it. The Android installed on the device appears to be branded by Qualcomm, rather than HP.
This started me thinking. Qualcomm wants and needs to be able to sell their processors and they are not blind to the fact that Android appears to be the OS of choice on Smart phones and tablets. So I did some looking around and I found out that there actually is one other device using the Qualcomm APQ8060. This device is not a consumer device--it is a special board designed for OEMs who want to use APQ8x60 series processors in their design. This device is called a DragonBoard and believe it or not Qualcomm has complete Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) source available for this device !!
click for DragonBoard and Aurora source code details
In addition, the DragonBoard and Touchpad share many components. The following chipsets/devices appear to be either compatible or identical on both the DragonBoard and Touchpad:
This is HUGE news. This means that in theory, the driver support for the devices listed above should work out of the box using this reference build. It also:
complete build folder here
Update: We now have a team of developers working on a new custom kernel for the touchpad called KRYPTONITE. Check out the details HERE and HERE
New Kryptonite Team Site:
I have pulled the latest GINGERBREAD source from the Aurora git hub and have built a very preliminary Android image, including:
Application boot-loader
flashed with the command:
fastboot flash aboot emmc_appsboot.mbn
Kernel
flashed with the command:
fastboot flash boot boot.img
System
flashed with the command:
fastboot flash system system.img.ext
Userdata
flashed with the command:
fastboot flash userdata userdata.img.ext
Persist(used for WIFI)
flashed with the command
fastboot flash persist persist.img.ext4
At this point I am simply waiting for my Touchpad to arrive, so I can test this.