HP TouchPad Android Installation Process Detailed

Tweet

It looks like we have been given another piece of the Android on the HP TouchPad puzzle. Though, before anyone with a TouchPad in hand gets super excited, the software is not yet available for anyone to download. Instead what we have here is a first look video.

That being said, the video certainly does make it look like it will be a nice set up once available. The TouchPad will get Android. In fact, the build of Android is being based off of 2.3.5. And in addition, it will be a dual-OS setup where the user will be able to have both webOS and Android installed.

The installer is dubbed the “ACME Installer” and is still noted as being “a CyanogenMod experimental installer.” But perhaps a bit more important for those considering using this once available, the crew is describing this as being a “fairly simple and hopefully safe method to install CM to your Touchpad.”

Based on the details that have been posted along with this video, one will be able to take their TouchPad, along with a USB cable and a few required files and have a dual-OS setup with minimal work. Thankfully though, the CyanogenMod team is promising “detailed, step-by-step written instructions” along with the public release of the software.

As for those few required files, they will include the ACME Installer, novacom and a cm-update.zip file. The novacom file comes from HP and is used to load and run the installer. This is available for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. As for the cm-update file, this is the one that contains all the good stuff, you know, the cyanogenmod stuff.

With that, as we have seen in the past, the CyanogenMod team is not offering anything in terms of a timeline as to when this will be released. But in the meantime check out the video below…

In today’s video, we take a fresh-from-the-box Touchpad, mount it to a Mac, create a folder called “cminstall” on the TouchPad, copy a “cm-update…zip” file (containing CM7) into that folder, then use the “novacom” program to start ACME Installer. At that point, we sit back and watch the installation. A minute or so later, the TouchPad boots into Cyanogenmod 7. You can switch back to WebOS any time you like.