Having scored myself an HP TouchPad, I am now watching CyanogenMod’s progress on porting Android Gingerbread to the HP TouchPad more closely than before. Their latest update indicates that several new features are now supported or actively being worked on. Wi-Fi, Android Market access and the accelerometer now are now working while the team continues to make progress on sound (somewhat working now). A number of features still don’t work though, including video playback via overlay, the camera, Bluetooth, the gyroscope, and more. It is nonetheless impressive progress considering they have been working on the project for only a few weeks.
CyanogenMod also shed some light on why they are working with Gingerbread rather than Honeycomb:
For those who have queried as to why we are not creating a Honeycomb port using binaries from the Android SDK — we are focused on building from the Gingerbread source to pave the way for Google’s upcoming code release of Ice Cream Sandwich.
The team does not have an ETA as to when the project will be done. Why? “Because we have no idea when we will be done. There are always going to be unforeseen obstacles which could take a very long time to workaround.” Fair enough.