CM9 Alpha 0 for Touchpad released

The Cyanogen Mod team has released a very early release of CM9 for the HP Touchpad, it`s so early they`re calling it an Alpha 0 release and advise that it is pretty much less stable and usable than any of the CM7 Alphas that have so far been released. It looks pretty smooth from the video that is out but as you’ll see there is still some work to be done.

The list of things that don`t work is pretty extensive which is what the Cyanogen Mod team have decided to concentrate on in the RootzWiki page, so that gives you an idea of how usable the system is :

• 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.

So if you are really keen to play around with it and know what you are doing then go for it, however with this early a build, I would recommend just looking but not touching.

The Video demonstration looks great for an Alpha 0 release but it’s still not really what I’m personally prepared to use on my Touchpad just yet, I’m going to wait for an Alpha 1 or perhaps a Beta before I start playing with it, but all in all it’s great to see Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Touchpad :