It should be noted that the TouchDroid team is largely composed of, and led by young teenagers with not a lot of systems programming experience, and no history (that I know of) of "cooking" ROMs.
That's not saying young teenagers can't accomplish anything. They just spent too much time on their website and getting on the front page of every news site and too little (a little poking around) time looking into the feasibility of it, or getting any work done on the port.
Don't buy a TouchPad if you're thinking you'll be running TouchDroid on it any time soon.
1. The development team comes from the Nookdev team, and multiple other android porting/ROM projects
2. The website was done by a friend of the team that is not doing any of the actually porting work
3. For $99, the TouchPad is sort of an impulse buy... and even though we do not have an ETA for release, we do plan on getting this working and released at some point. Do you see the CyanogenMod Team ever commenting on the next release date?
just picked up one this weekend, some reasons are:
1. WebOS international support is terrible. This is a huge reason to get Android on it. They've completely ignored it.
2. The browser while good, the card system is slow when trying to use it as a tabbed browser. Opening a new link in a new card is quite slow. I don't care for app support because their browser is good, but if you are going to rely on the browser at least have a decent tabbed browser. Look at Dolphin browser on Android to see how a mobile browser should be done. Also another limitation seems to be I can't download files from the browser ex. dropbox.
3. Overall the system feels sluggish. Android has multitasking right, WebOS doesn't. After the Android team optimizes and overclocks this hardware, I imagine its going to be pretty good.
4. Lack of Customization, I can't even make a picture fullscreen wallpaper on the background. And since you can't place anything on the desktop/wall area.. a nice big picture would look good.
Overall its solid and feels polished, but WebOS is overall really lacking and compared to Honeycomb I don't see it as better. The best thing is flash support works great, and I can watch all the media I want from streaming flash sites. The biggest benefit is getting honeycomb/Ice cream sandwich on a solid tablet for $100.
*posted in another thread
I'll provide some quick steps on how I made mine snappy.
1. [Install Preware with WebOS Quick Install][1]
2. In Preware on the Touchpad,
a. install [UberKernel][2] (Kernel > Stable)
b. install [Govnah][3] (Application > System Utilities) and choose
the OnDemandTcl 1512 profile. This overclocks the device to
1.5 GHz (up from 1.2 GHz) and underclocks it to 192 MHz when
idle (down from 500 Mhz).
c. install the following patches
i. Faster Card Animation HYPER Version (Patch > Mojo)
ii. Increase Touch Sensitivity And Smoothness 10 (Patch > Misc)
iii. Muffle System Logging (Patch > System; primarily what
you're looking for if you don't want to use the custom kernel)
iv. Remove Dropped Packet Logging (Patch > Misc)
v. Unthrottle Download Manager (Patch > Misc)
I've only had the device for a couple of days now but haven't noticed any adverse effects. What prompted me to try it in the first place was [this ZDNet article][1], in which the author adds, "...my Skype video call to Jason Perlow was an hour long with video, and battery was down to 91 percent when ended."
It works totally fine with 3.0.2 (the only OTA update as far as I know), but I can't give a comparison, sorry. I updated the same day I got the device so I'm not sure how 3.0 was.
And not just the OS, but the associated app ecosystem will stagnate.
Whether you care about apps is a separate issue.
I read in a thread on xda that some people were asking about porting dalvik to WebOS so that android apps could be run without flashing to Android. I have no idea about the practicalities of doing that though (or the legality, given the whole Oracle/Android kerfuffle that's ongoing).
I was initially going to stop development and wait, but after hundreds of thousands of potential customers emerged over the weekend, it's full steam ahead.
I know it's the same for some other devs, as well. A good number of us are sticking around, at least supporting and fixing bugs on our apps, and creating new ones.
The ecosystem is definitely not dead yet, but we can only run on fumes for so long. If they get a hardware parter and new hardware that people lust for (imagine webOS on the likes of a Nexus S or Galaxy S II), we might be OK.
There's no new tablet hardware available, which limits growth on how many new developers can pick up a device and start developing against it.
The current influx of new users are sub-optimal customers compared to other platforms. They're either bargain hunters or gadget geeks that picked it up as a tertiary device.
That's not saying young teenagers can't accomplish anything. They just spent too much time on their website and getting on the front page of every news site and too little (a little poking around) time looking into the feasibility of it, or getting any work done on the port.
Don't buy a TouchPad if you're thinking you'll be running TouchDroid on it any time soon.