This weekend’s TouchPad fire sale has more or less petered out, and thousands of HP’s little tablets that couldn’t have found new homes. Not everyone seems to love WebOS though, as a growing number of people who bought bargain-bin TouchPads are clamoring for a tablet experience that’s a bit more… shall we say, relevant.
Thanks to its open nature, Android is the OS of choice for a TouchPad port, and now the folks at a modding community called HackNMod are offering bounties to the devs that can make it happen.
The total amount of money up for grabs is $1500, but it’s broken down into several parts, so multiple devs will get a chance at a payout.
Whoever is first able to get a “basic Android port” up and running on the TouchPad nets $400. HackNMod doesn’t elaborate on what exactly constitutes a “basic port,” but presumably the device would have to boot into Android with a decent degree of stability. The sub-bounties run the gamut as far as payout: the team that gets WiFi to work nabs $350, the audio team gets $300, and the multitouch team gets $100. Developers will have one more thing to contend with: their solutions have to be easy enough for the average user to install on their own.
As with all things, there is a bit of a catch: while the $450 for the Android port itself comes out of HackNMod’s pockets, the rest are being left up to sponsors. In a way, it’s the perfect system for a project like this: the features with the highest demand are (hopefully) the ones that will be funded. Interested parties can also throw in money for other features they want to see working, leading to more sub-bounties for eager devs to jump on.
Itching to throw your hat in the ring? Be sure to post your code on GitHub and provide photo & video evidence. Ready, go!
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