Jennifer's 365 Project

several months ago the HP TouchPad stopped working. We bought it back during the fire sale in 2011, so it's had a decent run, but for a device that was 90% of the time plugged in and used as a kitchen tablet (for recipes, etc), it feels like the device should have lasted longer.

Turns out there are a slew of posts from 2012 and 2013 where people started having issues powering the device on It wouldn't charge, or if it got too low, the device wouldn't power on and you had to do all sorts of weird tricks (button presses, charging on a lower power charger, etc). Or it would the file system was corrupt and preventing it from booting.

Chris tried all of the various charging and button mashing suggestions last year in an attempt to revive the device, and I repeated some of those yesterday, including the overnight lower power charge at 1A instead of 2A. Nothing.

So I decided to pop the case open and have a look. Taking the whole thing apart was kind of a nightmare to get to the battery. You unplug everything, including microphone, camera, wifi antenna, etc just so that you can pull up the housing to get to the underside and unplug the battery. This device was seriously more frustrating than it needed to be to take apart.

I did confirm 100% that the battery is dead and didn't take a single charge in the last 20 hours. Since it was possible the device was stuck in a boot loop (and thus appeared to be dead) I wanted to rule out that it was indeed the battery.

And it is.

Now to decide if it's worth investing $30 in a battery to maybe fix the problem or just give up. It is entirely possible that there's an issue with the motherboard preventing charging or it could just be the battery needs to be replaced.

There's a lot out on the net lately about taking the cheap HP touchpad and putting Android on it.

No. Don't. Yes, I understand people think since Android has more apps that its superior. No. It's not.

The best that can be hoped for is Froyo or Gingerbread to be ported. Honeycomb code hasn't been released-and that's the "tablet OS".

Ive used Android tablets. They're clunky, sort of like Android phones, but more annoying because the resolution is low and everything is huge. Yes, LCD density changer can fix that. But really, webOS on the Touchpad is designed for the table, multitasks well, and handles the basic functions most people use their tablets for - information consumption. News, social networking, etc.

I own an iPad-it was a gift. Lovely device (though the lack of an accessible file system is maddening). Yes, there is a difference between the Touchpad and the iPad. They also don't cost the same. Apples to oranges at this point.

For $99 and $149, The Touchpad is a steal and makes hacking a nook color to get a cheap tablet not worth it (unless you're doing it just because you can-which is awesome).

HP bought Palm last year. Chris and I were hopeful that didn't mean the end of the webOS platform. Both of us really liked our palm pre phones.

Of course, Chris's phone died and there were no webOS phones in sight so we both upgraded to Android phones. They're nice - but both Android and iOS have horrible notification systems in comparison to webOS.

Anyway, HP decided it was getting out of the webOS business. That means fire sale. The previously priced 399 and 499 HP Touchpad (which had only weeks before been 499 and 599) went down to 99 for the 16GB model and 149 for the 32GB model. Seriously - that's a steal. This thing may not have a Netflix app, but it does flash (unlike some other popular tablet I know) so that means you can watch Hulu. It has a Kindle app, Skype, RSS reader, etc. It has most of your staple tablet consumption applications. Plus, it comes with 50GB of storage on Box.net. Seriously. 50GB.
So all of this meant Chris woke up relatively early today and headed out at 6am to try to snag one. He came back a bit later with one on hold (until an employee's manager could confirm that the large price drop was, indeed, accurate) and some Marge's Doughnut Den Doughnuts. I ate 3 (they're so tasty!).
A little bit later, voila - in hand was a 32GB tablet. They were all out of the 16GB, which was our preference. Chris did some setup on it and gave it a home on top of the microwave. We now have what I've been wishing for - a tablet for the kitchen to pull up recipes (previously I've been printing them out, using my laptop, palm pre, ipod touch and so on).
I slapped Preware on it, which is the webOS homebrew catalog and away we went. I even put a nice twitter app on the device so Chris could monitor the Harvey Awards in real time to see how Adam and Comfort did.

They didn't win, but they were nominated. And seriously, that's a big deal. It's like the Oscars for comic books. They got to hang out in a room with Stan Lee and other huge comic names and have their work announced on stage. Super huge. Super awesome. I hope they're having a fantastic time at the Baltimore Comic Con.