How to install Android on the HP TouchPad

If you were lucky enough to get your hands on a cheap HP TouchPad a few months ago – or even if you paid full price – you’ve probably been waiting for a way to install Android on it. Now the CyanogenMod team, perhaps the web’s most respected Android hacking group, has released its alpha Android build for the device.

In this feature we’ll tell you what to expect, what works and what doesn’t, and – if you’re feeling brave – how to install it yourself.

Android on the TouchPad

The TouchPad hardware is more than capable of running Android. With its 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon CPU, it performs similarly to the Tegra 2-based tablets we’ve seen from the likes of Asus and Samsung. In the Quadrant benchmark we found a TouchPad running CyanogenMod’s alpha Android release scored 2,187, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with stock system software got 2,200.

The CyanogenMod Android build includes a few interface tweaks and features not normally found on stock Android devices, such as improved gesture support and an incognito browsing mode. But it lacks some of the aesthetic elegance of a dedicated Android tablet. Since source code for Android 3 (Honeycomb) hasn’t been made publicly available, this release of CyanogenMod (version 7.1) is based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), an older version of the OS originally designed for smartphones. For the future, the team plans to port Google’s forthcoming tablet-friendly Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to the TouchPad, but that probably won’t be with us for many months.

Android on the TouchPad therefore looks and feels a bit like using an outsized phone; and in fact all the phone and SMS apps and settings are still present in this alpha release, though of course they’re not functional. Since the TouchPad only has a single physical button, the CyanogenMod port adds soft buttons for Home, Back, Search and other features at the bottom of the screen, just like we’re used to seeing on Honeycomb tablets. In practice it’s a neat and usable solution.

Overall, while the CyanogenMod front-end is perhaps not as slick as Honeycomb, the TouchPad makes a perfectly good Android tablet.

What works, and what doesn’t

CyanogenMod 7.1 for the TouchPad is currently an alpha release, and bugs are to be expected. In our case we’ve found the operating system seems mostly stable, but a few times it’s failed to wake up from sleep, requiring us to restart the device. We’ve also found that our Wi-Fi connection cuts out intermittently, forcing us to disable and re-enable networking to regain connectivity.

Otherwise, though, hardware support is pretty solid, with the multitouch screen, accelerometers and Bluetooth networking all present and correct. GPU acceleration isn’t quite there yet, though: animations and scrolling can be very slightly jerky.

The biggest feature still lacking is the camera: with this build you can’t take photos or capture video. Then again, since the TouchPad’s camera faces forwards, it’s of limited use anyway.

There’s also no GPS, of course, since the TouchPad lacks GPS hardware. As there’s no SD card slot either, the internal 16GB or 32GB of internal storage is mounted as a virtual SD card. 2GB of this becomes the Android system partition; the rest you can fill with apps and media. WebOS remains functional too, so you can easily boot back into the TouchPad’s native environment if you wish.

We haven’t yet had a chance to test battery performance, but so far a single charge has been ample for two days of irregular browsing and playing with apps, and the team says it’s working to improve power management for the final release.

We tested a range of Android apps on the TouchPad, with both phone and tablet interfaces, and everything seemed to work fine – even system software such as replacement keyboards, and tools such as screenshot utilities that require root access. As we’ve noted above, graphics-heavy games and apps aren’t perfectly smooth, but they’re still perfectly usable.

The only real problem we hit was some apps refusing to install from the Android Market because they didn’t recognise the hardware: see below for more details on this issue, and possible ways round it.

In all, the CyanogenMod alpha release is clearly a work in progress, but it’s already usable for most tablet tasks – so long as you can live with the odd quirk or bit of flakiness. Based on what we’ve seen so far, there’s every reason to expect the final release will turn the TouchPad into a fully functional Android device.

Installing Android on your own TouchPad

By now you might fancy the idea of installing Android for yourself, and we have to say it really does give the TouchPad a new lease of life. Before you start, though, we need to be very clear about what this involves:

The CyanogenMod 7.1 alpha release is unofficial, alpha-quality software. Installing it on your TouchPad isn’t supported or recommended by HP, CyanogenMod or PC Pro. If you want to install it you do so absolutely at your own risk, and with no guarantee that your TouchPad will be stable or even usable once you’ve done so. The instructions given below assume a degree of technical expertise. If you do hit problems, don’t expect anyone to help. You’re on your own.

That’s not to say the installation is difficult: all you really need to do is copy a few files to your TouchPad, download a few tools to your PC and type in a one-line command. And we haven’t heard of anyone screwing up their hardware by trying to install the CyanogenMod software: if the various Android web forums are any indicator, the process appears to be safer than Apple’s official iOS 5 update! Nevertheless, to reiterate, this software is still experimental and unsupported, and you install it at your own risk.

If your TouchPad crashes or freezes during or after the installation, you can normally reset it by holding down the Home and power buttons together for ten seconds. If your system gets seriously messed up, you can perform a complete factory restoration of webOS using HP’s webOS Doctor tool.

Preparing your TouchPad for Android

We haven’t seen any reports of webOS software or settings interfering with the Android installer, but if you want to play it safe you can restore your TouchPad to its factory state using webOS Doctor, as above, before you start.

Alternatively, you could simply clear out your personal data and apps. To do this, press the menu button at the bottom right of the screen, swipe right to the Settings tab, open Device Info, click Reset Options and press Full Erase.

If you decide not to clear out your data, you should at least ensure there’s 2GB free on your TouchPad’s internal storage, so the Cyanogen installer can create the Android system partition.

When you’re ready to install Android, the first thing to do is connect your TouchPad to your PC and create a folder in the root directory called “cminstall”. Into this folder, you need to download several software packages: you can find links to them all on the official alpha release page (scroll down to the bottom of the long introductory post to find the links). You’ll also find more information, advice and FAQs on that page, as well as videos to help you out, so if you have trouble with any of the steps in this feature, that’s a good place to start.

The package links are headed “CM7”, “Clockwork Recovery” and “Moboot”. The files themselves, which should end up in the “cminstaller” folder on your TouchPad, are called:

• update-cm-7.1.0-tenderloin-a1-fullofbugs.zip
• update-cwm_tenderloin-1012.zip
• moboot_0.3.3.zip

Let the name of the CyanogenMod 7.1 package serve as another, not too subtle reminder that the operating system you are about to install is not release-quality software!

Preparing your PC

The next thing to do is download the installer to your PC. You’ll find this on the release page linked above, under the title “README and Installer”. The file itself is called ACMEInstaller.zip.

Once this file is downloaded, unzip it and extract the two files inside to a convenient folder on your PC (I created a folder on my desktop entitled “CM7”). The README file in this archive contains more information and instructions for the installation process, but you can work from this feature instead. If you want to read the README, it’s in a slightly unusual format that won’t display properly in Notepad, so open it in Word or WordPad.

The only other thing you need is a tool called Novacom, which is used to control the TouchPad from the Windows command prompt. This doesn’t seem to be available to download on its own anywhere, so it looks like you’ll have to download the entire 273MB webOS SDK to get it. Thank heavens for broadband.

You’ll find the SDK here (scroll down the page a bit to find it). Don’t bother installing Java or VirtualBox, as recommended on the page – those are only needed for actual application development. When the SDK installer runs, choose a Custom installation and install only the “Command Line Interface Tools”).

Once this is done, I suggest you go into your Program Files directory – or Program Files (x86) on a 64-bit system – browse into the installation folder and copy novacom.exe into the folder where you unzipped the ACME installer. This isn’t necessary but it will save you a bit of typing later on.

Putting the TouchPad into recovery mode

We’re ready now to run the installer – we just need to put the TouchPad into the right state to receive the Android ROM. To do this, make sure the TouchPad is connected to your PC by USB; then restart it. You do this by pressing the menu button at the bottom right of the screen, swiping right to the Settings tab, opening Device Info, clicking Reset Options and pressing Restart.

Once the screen goes dark, hold down the “volume up” button until the device reboots and you see a large USB logo appear on the TouchPad’s screen. Windows will complain about being unable to install the driver, but that’s normal.

Launching the installer

Open a command prompt and cd to the folder where you saved the installer, so in my case I typed:cd desktop\cm7

Then, assuming you copied the novacom tool into this folder, enter this line exactly as it appears here:

novacom boot mem://

If you didn’t copy the novacom tool into this folder you’ll need to provide a full path to it, which on a 64-bit system means you’d type:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\HP webOS\SDK\bin\novacom" boot mem://

If all is well, your TouchPad should spring to life and you’ll see the installer start to unpack and install Android. If not, check that your TouchPad is properly connected and in the right mode, make sure the novacom and ACMEInstaller files are in the right place and try again.

The whole installation should take only a minute or two: you might see the screen pause from time to time, or the odd error message scroll past, but don’t worry about that. Very shortly you should see the CyanogenMod splash screen, and your TouchPad will boot into Android for the first time.

If something goes wrong at this point, you can always reboot the TouchPad back into recovery mode and try again. In the worst case, it should always be possible to restore your TouchPad to its factory settings using webOS Doctor.

Installing Google applications

If all has gone well, you should now be staring at the Android home screen. It will look rather bare, as the CyanogenMod installer doesn't set up any large friendly homescreen widgets, like you might expect to see on a screen this size.

It also doesn’t install familiar applications such as Gmail or Facebook - and nor do you get the Android Market app to download other applications from. So one of the first things you’ll want to do is install these.

To do this, connect your TouchPad to a wireless network (I’m assuming you know, or can work out, how to do this); then browse to the “Latest Version/Google Apps” page on the CyanogenMod wiki. The table at the bottom of the page contains links to various Google Apps packages: tap the download link for CyanogenMod 7 and let the zip file download onto your TouchPad.

To install this application package, you need to reboot into the ClockworkMod recovery environment. This is very simple: hold down the power button on your TouchPad for a second and you’ll see a menu with (among other options) a Reboot option. Tap it, select Recovery and tap OK.

In a few moments you’ll be at the ClockwordMod menu. ClockworkMod is a very simple interface for installing system ROMs and updates. You navigate it using the volume up and down buttons; press the Home button to select a menu item.

(You may also notice that your TouchPad now has a boot menu that lets you choose whether to boot into webOS or Android when you start it up: this uses the same buttons as ClockworkMod.)

To install your freshly-downloaded Google Apps package, navigate down and select “install zip from sdcard” from the main ClockworkMod menu, then select “choose zip from sdcard”. Browse into the “download” folder and select the Google Apps zip file.

You’ll then see a confirmation menu, offering one option to install the zip file and ten options simply saying “No”, just to make sure you don’t install the wrong file by accident. Go ahead and install the zip file – it only takes a few seconds. When that’s done, go back to the main menu and select “reboot system now”.

When you land back in Android you’ll be walked through the process of setting up your Google account and installing various apps, just as you would on a brand new Android phone or tablet.

Note: I imagine it should be possible to install the Google Apps alongside CyanogenMod 7 by including the zip file in your “cminstall” folder when you run the installer. But the installation instructions don’t mention such a possibility, so I suggest you play it safe. At any rate, installing the apps in this way is a good opportunity to learn how to use ClockworkMod to install updates. You'll be able to use the same process to install the CyanogenMod 7 beta and final releases as they become available.

Missing apps

While your Google Apps are being configured in Android, you’ll probably see a few error messages complaining that some apps couldn’t be found. Google Maps, for example, will probably be missing. And though you should now have the Android Market, if you try to download Maps you won't be able to find it. Go in via a web link and you'll see a yellow error bar saying that it’s not compatible with your device.

This is because the Market automatically hides and restricts apps from devices that aren’t specifically approved by the developer, or which don’t match a specified hardware profile. Needless to say, very few Android apps have been tested on the TouchPad, or designed with it in mind. Problematic apps include not only Google Maps but the original Angry Birds and the official Android Facebook and Twitter clients.

In reality, pretty much any app that works on an “official” Android tablet should work perfectly well on the TouchPad, if you can only get it to install. It’s technically possible to do this by spoofing your device’s “fingerprint”, to make the Market think you’re using (say) a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 – but at present I don’t know of an easy way to do this.

A simpler approach is to search the web for a downloadable copy of the installer – the apk, as it’s known in Android jargon. There are plenty of third-party hosts that will let you download “incompatible” apps without any hardware checking: I had no problem finding installers for Google Maps and Twitter by simply searching for “google maps apk” and “twitter apk”. Once the apk is downloaded, simply tap to install it.

Doing it this way comes with some caveats, though. First, the app won’t be registered with the Market app, so you won’t get automatic updates or notifications: when new versions appear you’ll have to find and install them manually.

Second, before you can install apps that you’ve downloaded from a website, you have to enable “untrusted sources” in Android’s application settings. This isn’t a problem in itself, but it raises an important point: when you download an apk from an unknown site, you can’t be certain it’s legit. Since the TouchPad doesn’t have phone capabilities, there’s no danger of malware running up bills, but a rogue app could still – for example – steal personal and financial information. Keep an eye on which permissions apps request when you install them, and consider installing an antivirus app that can identify known malware and suspicious activity.

If you really want to play it safe it's best to avoid installing untrusted apk installers altogether. In many cases there’s an alternative application on the Market that will install on the TouchPad, and for services such as Google Maps and Facebook you can always use the web interface.

Getting involved and supporting the project

We’ll keep on playing with our Android TouchPad, and we’re looking forward to future releases bringing more features and better stability. If you want to find out more about Android and the TouchPad, the installer link is above is a good place to start – it’s hosted on the RootzWiki forum, which carries extensive discussions about Android development, ports and news.

For more general information about the CyanogenMod team, visit the official website, where you’ll find more discussions, blogs, news and Android ROMs not just for the TouchPad but for a huge range of smartphones and tablets. You can also support the project and show your thanks for CyanogenMod’s work on the TouchPad by making a donation: there’s a link at the bottom of the front page.