Setting aside the iPad, tablets are still crawling after HP's defunct tablet

Feb 13, 2012 13:25 GMT  ·  By

The paradox of the HP TouchPad continues as USA Today has some fairly strange things to share with the world, things that may not leave Android tablet makers very enthused.

USA Today's internal app has been downloaded many times since its release, but the ratio of Android vs. TouchPad downloads is the interesting part.

Apple customers will have noticed that we did not include the iPad in that statement, and the reason is easy enough to guess.

Long story short, the number of times USA Today's app was downloaded to iPads far surpasses that of Android and HP TouchPad owners put together, by a factor of four to be precise.

Still, it says a lot that, while the number of downloads known to have been made on Android devices is somewhere around 120,000, TouchPad downloads reached 250,000. Yes, that is more than twice the number.

Granted, this is all about a single app, so the situation could be drastically different when others are factored in. Then again, it might as well not.

Either way, it goes to show that, like that time when HP sold the TouchPad for $99 fast enough to make eBay faint, many people own that product.

One can only wonder what will happen when the CyanogenMod team completes that Android 4.0 port for it.

Though not yet ready, it is far enough along that it is only a matter of time before the operating system is fully supported by HP's hardware.

In fact, the most recent release has the Android Market running just fine even now, so there are probably many TouchPad downloads that aren't even flagged as such.

For those who want to learn more about the paradox that is this webOS tablet, it even ended up as the leading non-iPad tablet last year, after being officially up for order for just a few weeks.