If you managed to get your hands on one of the fire-sale HP TouchPads on Monday, congratulations on your new purchase. App support may be thin on the ground - and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future - but there are a few tweaks and workarounds you can employ to make the most of your new tablet. HP has reportedly even worked with the homebrew community. There's even an enthusiast group porting Android to the Touchpad.
Also Read - HP TouchPad: 5 signs it's a better buy than first thought
For those wanting to get involved in this homebrew community, we've collected some trips below. Like any system tweak you run the risk of things going wrong with your HP Touchpad when making changes to the system - so only try these tips if you're comfortable with this. If you're not sure, or don't want to run the risk of your Touchpad not working, don't attempt this.
1. Get around the paltry selection of free apps
First things first: to get around the paltry selection of free apps in the HP App Catalog, you’ll need to ‘jailbreak’ the TouchPad. To do this, turn Developer Mode on in your TouchPad by typing “webos20090606” (without the quotation marks) into the ‘Just type…’ field and press enter. In the next window, tap the ‘off’ slider to switch on Developer Mode. Press ‘submit’ when it asks for the password. Next, install webOS Quick Install here. This Java app will automatically install the requisite Novacom drivers once it loads, and you’ll then need to attach the TouchPad via USB. Press the Globe icon on the right hand side in webOS Quick Install to load all the available files, find Preware in the list and click the Install button. Once Preware is installed on the TouchPad, you won’t need to use webOS Quick Install on your computer to sideload apps anymore.
2. Speed things up
HP may not be issuing any more updates to improve the TouchPad’s performance, but you can speed things up yourself by turning off webOS’ background event logging (with no one at the reins, this feature is now pointless anyway). Go to the Phone & Video Calls app, tap on the Dialpad, and enter the following: ##5647#. Tap the dial button, and the Collect Logs window will appear. Tap the Change Logging Levels button and press ‘Set Logging to Minimal’. This will remove most of the event logging in the background, but you can disable the logging completely using a couple of homebrew patches. Open the Preware app you installed in step 1 (found in the ‘Downloads’ section of the app launcher) and search for and install ‘Muffle System Logging’ and ‘Remove Dropped Packet Logging’.
3. Speed things up even more
Still not satisfied with the TouchPad’s performance? You can take it to the next level by overclocking the processor to 1.5GHz. Open Preware and install the Govnah app. Then go back to Preware and tap on the drop-down menu in the top left corner. Select Manage Feeds, scroll to the bottom and tap on the name field. Enter “webos-kernels-testing” (without the quotation marks) [Correction: this has been corrected from "web-os-kernels-testing"] in the Name field, and enter http://preware.is.awesome.com/ in the URL field. Tap Add field and then ok in the following prompt. Reboot the TouchPad and open Preware again. Do a search for UberKernel (TouchPad) and install it. Finally, open Govnah (in the Downloads section of the app launcher), tap on profile and select the OnDemandTcl1512 profile. You should then see CPU 1 Frequency jump to 1.512GHz.
4. Some fine tuning
Another couple of tweaks you can install through Preware are Unthrottle Download Manager (removes the 64kb/s download speed limitation), Increase Touch Sensitivity and Smoothness and Increase Touchpad Volume.
5. Playback DivX, XviD, WMV and MKV video files
The lack of paid apps in the HP Apps Catalog essentially locks Aussie users out of a document editor and multi-format media player, but you can get around these hurdles quite easily. QuickOffice has a pledged to deliver an update to the preloaded software soon that will enable creating and editing documents, but in the meantime, you can simply fire up Google Docs in the web browser for full desktop functionality. To playback DivX, XviD, WMV and MKV video files, install KalemSoft Media Player by going to www.kalemsoft.com/site/downloads2.html, clicking on the red link for KalemSoft Media Player v0.3.3 for TouchPad. This will open the installer in Preware; click Install, open KalemSoft Media Player, tap Local Media, and navigate to the video files that you’ve transferred from your computer.
Own an HP Touchpad? Tell us what you think of it, add your own tips below.
Also read - HP TouchPad: 5 signs it's a better buy than first thought