CM9 on TouchPad and APQ8660 review

This is NOT a review of the latest CM9 nightly build. This one was released on 4/04/12 and was not updated to the latest because I simply do not have the time right now.

And also, this will not be a full review of HP Touchpad as I intend to do that on Android 4.0.3 so that the data (of Tegra2 and TI OMAP 4430) I have are comparable. For these reasons, there will be no comparisons made in this post(to the mentioned SOC).

HP Touchpad Specs
CPU: Qualcomm APQ8660,  Dual Scorpion cores at 1.2GHz.
GPU: Adreno 220.
RAM: 1GB.
Display: 9.7" 1024x768 IPS.

General Performance
In day-to-day tasks, it is smooth enough although there seems to be a little lag in the menu/launcher every time it is launched. Not terrible but the brief slowdowns are noticeable. Browsing experience is excellent, pinch-to-zoom gesture worked nicely although again, you will experience some hiccups/lag on sites with flash ads. I have to say this though, although the experience itself is smooth, it is noticeably slower than on Advent Vega and Ten3 T15.

Sunspider 0.9.1

Rightware Benchmark 

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack Mutli-Thread

Linpack Single-Thread

Quadrant

Antutu

Issues
As with all builds of Android on TouchPad, the camera and internal mic are not accessible. I also experienced the 'battery drain' syndrome described by many others but its not that severe in my opinion. Although the GPU in the Touchpad is quite powerful(quite possibly the most powerful among the three), the CPU side is not as powerful and this shows while playing many games (stuttering in ShadowGun opening and stutters while in-game playing Ninja Chicken for example.)

To be honest, the only device which never had any slowdown playing these games in my experience is the Ten3 T15. My educated guess would be these games are more CPU-bound than GPU bound at these times. This could also be due to the Scorpion CPU cores being in-order rather than being out-of-order like the other 2 competitors hence the lower performance.

The sound quality coming from the internal speakers(which is the best I have heard so far) under the webOS is also significantly better than under any Android ROMs I have tested. There will be a video on this in a later post.

Other than that, I can honestly say that I enjoyed using this ROM on my Touchpad. Big thanks to the people at the CyanogenMod and all the other developers who worked hard at making this happen! Thank you for supporting a 'dead' product :)