CM9 Alpha 0 is released for the Touchpad
Just a few days ago I posted a video showing off CyanogenMods version of Ice Cream Sandwich on the HP Touchpad. I said that hopefully we would be seeing a release to the public soon. I never expected it to be this soon however. Last evening the CM team released a version of ICS dubbed CM9 Alpha 0. There are a whole list of cautions that come with it, as well as a sizeable list of things that aren’t working. Jump past the break to learn more.
Here is the list of things not working taken directly from the thread on Rootzwiki.com:
- Hardware Video (OMX). As a result, Netflix does not work, YouTube works only only in non-HD videos.
- Audio is a mess. The microphone does not work. Work on the current libaudio solution has halted because we will eventually switch to a CAF libaudio.
- Camera does not work. The only libcamera.so that we have is from froyo and its closed source. There is a wrapper for QCOM gingerbread libcamera libraries that could likely be used as a basis to get our camera working.
- Market filters prevent some apps from being installed (this can partly solved by switching back to standard DPI settings(120, 160, 240). The current build is using 160 which fixes the market but makes everything look ugly and low resolution.
- Titanium Backup crashes the kernel. There’s an investigation in progress…There are reports that older versions do work.
- Most of the hardware problems from CM7 still exist in this CM9 alpha build.
- Gapps intended for CM7/Gingerbread will not work in CM9/ICS. If you choose to install GAPPS then you’ll need to get an updated compilation
- USB file transfers use MTP or PTP in Ice Cream Sandwich and Honeycomb. Traditional storage mounting is not supported in the Touchpad build.
Since I am a brave soul, and the Alpha moniker doesn’t really bother me, I went ahead and got all the files together that I needed to get some ICS goodness on my tablet. I’ve been playing with it for a while today, and have to say I really like it. If I was coming from a Honeycomb version of Android I wouldn’t see what the big deal was, but the CM7 version that was on my Touchpad is actually the phone version, so a version of Android that is actually optimized for a tablet makes me very happy.
I’ve found a few issues since I started playing with it, but nothing that is so bad that I can’t use my tablet. The only one that was kind of major was when I tried to shut off notifications using the toggle in the settings menu, it caused the main system ui to crash, and I had to reinstall CM9 to get it back. As long as you don’t touch that toggle you should be fine. Battery drain is another issue a lot of people have been having, so you might want to watch that. If you plan on installing CM9 on your Touchpad don’t forget to make a nandroid backup first. I also recommend reading through the entire thread over at Rootzwiki.com. It will answer a lot of questions, and also solve a lot of problems you might run into.
[Rootzwiki CM9 Thread]
