Bargain hunters who were able to get the tablet deal of the year, a cheap full-featured TouchPad for $99 are now closer to getting a touch of Android running as an app in webOS and a new prize-winning text-to-speech app.
There is an Android app that runs from an IPK and lets Android run within a card. It is believed to be running as virtual machine or Android SDK emulator. It doesn't run YouTube videos or audio and lacks multi-touch, but gives webOs a touch of Android.
Meanwhile, HP has not abandoned webOS developers. The HP developer relations team has announced the first of many weekly App Hack challenges. The prize this week is a 32 GB TouchPad. This weeks' app challenge is for a text-to-speech app.
HP is providing some code to help developers. We're pretty certain that they are not going to encourage an Android hack.
HP.com is currently having a sale on...printers and no word on HP TouchPads, yet. If the developer challenge brings in more webOS developers, then you won't Android to run on your TouchPad because you'll have too many great webOS apps. Maybe HP is getting ready to sell webOS to Amazon and bargain hunters will get the best bargains on books as well as tablets...