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Android comes to HP Touchpad – Still none for RIM’s Playbook

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One of the surprising tech news stories of the summer was the death, and then quick resurgence of HP’s Touchpad.

Last month, the computing giant announced it would make computers no more, and decided to ditch its slow-selling Touchpads in a firesale, where the devices were being sold for as low as $99. The surprising result was that those darn devices finally started selling – like hotcakes (but still not quite like iPads). HP has announced that it would put out one more run of the touchpads that were already in the process of being manufactured before the device goes the way of the BetaMax (Sony’s version of the VCR for those of you too young [for those too young to know what a VCR is, ask your parents]) . Speaking of the BetaMax, the Touchpad had a similar problem – no content created for it.

When I tried out the device back in June, I was surprised that after all the money HP spent to buy the Web OS operating system, that there were paltry few applications designed just for the Touchpad. In fact, most of the apps seemed to be designed for Palm phones, and HP didn’t provide what is native in the iPad, where you can double the size of the screen on any device designed for the iPhone.

Aside from the lack of apps, however, I found the tablet to be one of the best I have ever tried.

That’s probably why after the Touchpad firesale went so well, there was a lot of buzz around getting Android to work on the device. Having Android working on the Touchpad would give the best of both worlds to Apple haters and those who need Adobe flash. It would bring hundreds of thousands of apps to what is one of the best built tablets out there.

Well, apparently Android support is near. According to this report from Geek.com, some expert hackers are close to making the software work on the dual-core device. Will this newfound Android support spur HP to get back into the hardware game? Don’t count on it.

However, the buzz around the Touchpad has shown other tablet makers what they have to do to succeed in the very competitive tablet market.

It also shows that if a tablet with solid hardware, like the Blackberry Playbook for example, could succeed in getting Android applications to work on it, it could boost that device’s sales significantly.

For its part, RIM has said several times it would roll out software that would allow the Playbook to run Android apps, yet so far this has not happened, even though there were rumours such software would be included in the product’s launch last spring. At last report, it could be late fall before the Playbook supports Android apps. By that time, the tablet market will have likely changed quite a bit (with Amazon’s tablet set to be unveiled in the next few weeks), and the Playbook, which has had some good sales numbers, could lose ground.

In fact, that may already be happening, as RIM announced it will give a $100 rebate in the form of a prepaid MasterCard gift card to anyone in Canada (except Quebec) who purchases a Playbook.



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