Over the years since its release, the HP TouchPad has become somewhat of a hero tablet for the Android platform, despite the fact that the slate was initially released with a different mobile operating system called webOS, developed by Palm and Hewlett-Packard. The tablet was launched in 2011 and is no longer manufactured, but over the past few years, the HP TouchPad has received numerous unofficial Android-based ROMs, including ROMs based on Android 5.0 Lollipop and Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Now the developer community has started working on a new custom ROM for the HP TouchPad called Evervolv, in a quest to bring Android 7.0 Nougat to the aging HP TouchPad.
Evervolv is an AOSP-based ROM, meaning that it was built on top of Google’s Android 7.0 Nougat open source code in order to deliver a user experience close to the real thing. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the ROM is in development, and there are certain features that either don’t work or are buggy, for both the Wi-Fi only model as well as the 4G variant. This includes the camera, and “a lot of features” that are not (yet) installed. In any case, the ROM requires a system partition with a minimum capacity of 1312 MB, and HP TouchPad owners who have already installed an earlier Android custom ROM and take advantage of a larger system partition should have no trouble flashing Evervolv on their tablets. Otherwise, enthusiasts whose tablets don’t have a large enough system partition can head down to the XDA Developers forum (source link below) for more details, instructions, and necessary resources in order to prepare the slate for the Android 7.0-based ROM.
As for the HP TouchPad itself, readers who may be interested in acquiring this tablet or are curious about its capabilities should know that the slate features a 9.7-inch LED-backlit LCD display with a resolution of 1024 x 768, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 SoC featuring a dual-core Scorpion CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz, and an Adreno 220 graphics chip. The system relies on 1 GB of RAM, and overall the tablet draws energy from a non-removable Li-Ion battery with a 6,300 mAh capacity. Needless to say, the HP TouchPad is an outdated piece of technology by today’s standards, but the developer community’s efforts to keep the slate up and running with Android OS is what makes the HP TouchPad that much more interesting.