After HP announced it would discontinue production of its TouchPad tablet last week, it looked like early HP tablet adopters spent $500 on a dud. If you’re an enterprising software hacker, however, there could be an opportunity to make your money back — and then some.
A hardware-modification web site is offering a $1,500 cash bounty for the first person to successfully port a full version of the Android operating system over to HP’s TouchPad.
Hacknmod.com offers a tiered bounty system for would-be TouchPad hackers: Just getting Android to run on the TouchPad without taking full advantage of the tablet’s hardware will win you a cool $450. But the more you’re able to integrate the system software into the device, the more cash you’ll earn. Get the Wi-Fi, multitouch capability, audio and camera up and running, and you’ll add another $1,050 to the pot.
While the bounty is characteristic of the Android-modding crowd which basically wants to slap Android onto anything with a circuit board and touch screen, it’s also an admirable effort to breathe new life into a dying piece of hardware. After reports of dismal sales and third-party retailers sitting on hundreds of thousands of unsold TouchPads, HP decided to kill production after a mere 49 days on the market.
It was bad news for current TouchPad owners. No more HP hardware gives little incentive for webOS app developers to continue producing applications for the platform. In turn, TouchPad owners miss out on the latest popular applications to come to mobile devices. And of course, it gives potential customers no incentive to buy the remaining TouchPads retailers have in stock, costing HP and retail stores hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone loses.
But if the porting plans work, it could mean bringing a slew of Android apps over to HP’s tablet. If the TouchPad can be made capable of running thousands of Android apps, the device may not be obsolete.
This isn’t the first time the Android-modification community tried to port the operating system over to non-Android devices. Android modders have run the operating system on Barnes And Noble’s Nook Color e-reader, certain Nokia smartphones and even an iPhone.

The bounty to get a workable version of the Android operating system installed on the now-discontinued HP TouchPad is up to $2,000+, as of today.
As we previously reported, the goal of this project is to get some version of Android 2.x onto the TouchPad and, most importantly, stable. If successful, this effort will help keep the HP tablet a little more relevant to those unfortunate early adopters who have been left with a mobile operating system whose future is decidedly uncertain.
The project is being led by the modding community called HackNMod, which said it would divvy up the money to developers who achieve certain milestones, such as the first to get a “basic” port up and running, the first to get Wi-Fi working, the first to get audio functional, etc. $450 for the Android port itself comes from HackNMod itself, while the remaining portion will come from sponsors.
Today, the popular developer forum site XDA announced it, too, is getting in on the effort and has teamed up with HackNMod to increase the bounty to over $2,000. Its donation comes from an anonymous XDA member. XDA also has a dedicated forum for the TouchPad and TouchPad development. The forum thread announcing the increased bounty is here.
One group to watch in this effort is RootzWiki, which is working own its own “Touchdroid” project detailed here. Something tells us they’re going to end up with a good bit of that cash prize.