Android on TouchPad team splits into two efforts 2011

The effort to port the Android operating system onto the HP TouchPad seems to have splintered into two separate teams after a brief but nasty civil war that included name-calling and allegations of theft.

HP’s WebOS tablet recently became a hot commodity following the company’s announcement that it was discontinuing the tablet, and liquidation pricing as low as $99–or 80 percent off–led to lines at Best Buys and ubiquitous “out of stock” pages at online retailers.

Earlier this week, a project emerged on the RootzWiki forums with the goal of putting Android on the TouchPad. A simple post listed a handful of team leaders and the goal of first porting the Gingerbread version of Android, followed by Honeycomb and/or Ice Cream Sandwich (once it’s released). Now just a few days later, the author of that post–15-year-old Thomas Sohmers–is striking out on his own.

The series of events and discussions that led to the split is a bit muddy, but the decisive moment seems to be an article published online Wednesday by PC Magazine. In it, Sohmers accuses one of the other team leads of soliciting donations for the project and using the funds to buy TouchPads that he then resold for a profit.