I was one of the lucky few to bag a TouchPad during the fire sale, thanks to a friend at HP. I have installed a few of the available apps for WebOS and have been playing with it on and off. Not as much as I play with my iPad though. The limited app availability made me wonder if I should continue to keep the TouchPad, especially with the advent of the shiny new Android tablets. But, the new tablets have a smaller form factor and I was not too keen on getting a tablet the size of my Kindle.
So, I decided to keep my TouchPad and breath new life into it.
I installed Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, to be precise. Until the beginning of the year, only Gingerbread was available for the tablet, but then the CyanogenMod team released CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) built on Ice Cream Sandwich and I knew it was time to jump ship. There are several sites that take you through the process of installing Android 4.0 on the TouchPad and I won't go through the details here. The installation can be tricky from what I hear, but mine went smooth but for some starting trouble.
The only issue I had was with the Universal Novacom Installer. I was installing it on my Win 7 64-bit machine and it would just hang trying to initialize the installer. Then, I found out that you can download the webosdoctor file from Palm (found here) and point the installer to use this file instead. From here onwards, the installation went flawlessly.
I now have an Android tablet with all my favorite apps installed on it. I didn't delete WebOS so I actually have a dual boot. I can switch over to WebOS whenever I want with just a reboot. The only dis-advantage of installing CM9 is that it renders the camera useless. If you want to use the camera, you will have to boot the tablet to WebOS. I am waiting for the build with a fix to the camera so I can use Skype on the tablet.
If you are one of those people wondering what to do with the TouchPad, this is a great alternative which will open up the app world for you.