More than five years after HP discontinued its TouchPad tablet, the ROM building community continues to release new software for the 9.7 inch tablet. Want to take Android 7.0 Nougat for a spin on the TouchPad? Now there’s a ROM for that. hp touchpad_01

Note that while Evervolv 7.0 for the HP TouchPad is the first Nougat-based ROM for the tablet I’m aware of, it’s still very much a work in progress. Some features aren’t working yet, and the camera isn’t currently supported.

That said, developers have now ported every version of Android since Android 2.3 Gingerbread to run on the aging tablet… which originally shipped with Palm and HP’s webOS.

Android 7.0 brings new features including multi-window support, allowing you to view and interact with two apps at the same time.

If you’ve already installed an earlier build of Android on the TouchPad and has a custom recovery and a system partition of 1312MB of larger, you should be able to flash Evervolv 7.0. If this is your first time setting up the tablet to run Android, or if you’re coming from a much older build of Android and don’t have a large enough system partition, you can use the TPToolbox utility from developer jcsullins to configure the TouchPad.

Thanks to Fred for the screenshot!
Thanks to Fred for the screenshot!

The HP TouchPad is a 1.6 pound tablet that features a 1024 x 768 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and a 1.2 Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 dual-core processor.

It was released in 2011 and represented HP’s first big push into the mobile tablet space, following a multi-billion dollar acquisition of Palm. Priced at $499 and up, the HP TouchPad was the company’s answer to the similarly-priced iPad… but few people were willing to spend that kind of money on a webOS tablet.

Less than two months after launch, HP discontinued the TouchPad and sold off remaining inventory for prices as low as $99. At that price, people did rush out to buy the tablet, many with hopes of eventually being able to replace webOS with Android.

And that’s what enthusiasts have been doing ever since.

These days there’s not really much reason to go out and buy an HP TouchPad. There are plenty of other reasonably-priced Android tablets with better specs on the market. But if you’ve been hanging onto a TouchPad for all these years, it’s pretty exciting to see what it’s still capable of.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

18 replies on “Now you can run Android 7.0 on the HP TouchPad”

  1. I was successful in loading Android 7 on my touchpad. I updated from a much earlier version. The reason i went with 7.0 is because thhat earlier version was sloowwwwwww and would frequently lock up (and sometimes reboot itself). It SEEMED like it was unable to reallocate memory and would get overwhelmed. Now, this version 7.0 is starting to do similar. Anyone else encountering the same issue? Did i incorrectly allocate partitions during the upgrade?
    I followed the procedures from jcsullins excellent posts verbatim. In the earlier version of Android, I would get some love by going into Settings and empty the cache for all apps and stop them from running. Hmmmm

  2. I just installed Nougat on my Touchpad. I am having trouble with my bluetooth speakers and bluetooth in general but everything else seems to be working fine. If you had Dish Anywhere running and it stopped working it will work again with Nougat. That was the driving force for me to upgrade. This old tablet is one heck of a solid piece of hardware. Works as well today as it did on the first day I had it.

  3. Hello,
    ok, downloaded and installed. very simple…
    special thanks to developers…
    thank you,
    EPA

  4. I always get a bit of amusement when TouchPad compatibility for the latest version of Android invariably comes down the pipe. Those people who took advantage of the fire sale were damn clever.

  5. My touchpad won’t boot up anymore. Spent a year in my sock drawer, and I think I overdrained the battery. Tried a couple of charging-cycle tricks, but its dead.

    1. Yeah, I’m trying to revive mine right now, which is why I don’t have a better picture to accompany this article. 🙂

      1. I’ve got one kicking around as well. It did die once but I got it back by leaving it on the charger for a couple of days straight.

      2. Try the refrigerator trick. Maybe exercise more caution since it’s a tablet.

      3. Mine had drained out on more than one occasion and wouldn’t boot. I tried several combinations of chargers and cables when I wanted to see if it would come back to life, but most everything didn’t work. Then I left it plugged in on the original charger with a good cable, and eventually the home button started doing a strange flashing pattern (left and right halves of the button would alternate blinks). Many hours of charging later, she booted up. I try not to let it get this bad any more, even though i dust the old TouchPad off only every couple months at most.

        Long story short, keep trying. They do eventually come back to life, usually.

        1. I have the charging easel the charges my touchpad Wireless and I’m using my HP TouchPad as an alarm clock using Smart Alarm I turned it off in the morning sometimes and then just flipped the switch back on for the power brick but I do love it as an alarm clock knowing that if the power goes out the battery is still good and I don’t have to worry about the alarm not going off check out Smart Alarm it works great with the touchpad not sure what version of Android I have on it right now

        2. There is a reset trick as well by holding a few buttons down simultaneously when it locks up. Works every time. I use my Touchpad all the time to watch TV from my DISH account. Amazing that I can control my DVR using the Touchpad. I think the product is legendary at this point.

    2. My Touchpad has drained the battery too far and refused to boot or charge multiple times but I was always able to get it to boot again without too much trouble. Then one time it sat for a long time and when I plugged it in the home button would blink one half than the other and the tablet would do absolutely nothing else. I tried for a day or two to get it to turn on and searched forums with little luck. I just kept unplugging it and plugging it back in every time I thought about it and in about 3-4 days I checked it one time and it had booted. Not saying yours will too, but if you really want it, I would say stick with it for a while and keep unplugging it and plugging it back in. It brought mine back when I thought all hope was lost. I was using a non-hp 2.0 amp charger, would imagine that might help. Good luck!

    3. Not sure if you got your TouchPad working bt this may help someone with a similar issue. I just revived my TouchPad after 3 years of just sitting on a shelf collecting dust. When I plugged it in, a horizontal light on the home bottom began moving back forth. Sweeeet…a sign of life! I left it plugged in for a few hours and tried to boot it, nothing happen, the light on the home button was still moving. I unplugged and plugged it and tried to reboot every few hours. It took 1.5 days of being on the charger for it to finally boot up, and once it did, it only had 25% battery life….weird. Keep trying to get it working, dont give up, it could take literally days before coming back to life.

  6. Looks like the HTC HD2 port is imminent. Those two are always released within days of each other.

  7. Amazing that the TouchPad, after all these years, is going to get a semi-functional Android 7.0 before many of my more modern devices. Granted, I didn’t find Marshmallow ran all that well, but it’s certainly fun to just push that old dog far further than HP ever intended to make it go.

    Still sad they killed Palm as horribly as they did. The Pre3 was a pretty nice phone.

Comments are closed.