Gadgetory

everyone it's michael fisher with pocket now now we've seen android running on some pretty small devices before like the Xperia Mini but I've never run it on something quite so small as this before this is the HP veer and some enterprising folks have figured out how to replace its webOS operating system with Android so we're going to give it a try ourselves and see how well this early build runs on such a small device or we're going to break it stay tuned okay for this procedure we're going to need a PC the USB cable that came with the veer remember it's a special one and the HP veer itself with at least one gig of memory free and a degree of intrepidity I wasn't joking before when we're talking about bricking this is a procedure which if done improperly could very well render your veer completely unusable so proceed at your own risk okay so the first thing we want to do is make sure a piece of software called Nova comm is installed on your computer this is a software driver package that allows your machine to communicate with a webOS device via USB the easiest way to install nova comm on your machine is to download it directly from the source there's a post in one of the threads linked below that features direct links to the nova comm drivers so do that first if you've used webOS quickinstall there will already be a folder in your filesystem called Palm Inc if there's not go ahead and create one under Program Files then download the Acme installer and unzip it to that same palm folder there's a link to that one in the same post I just mentioned once that's taken care of let's navigate to the Android on veer site and at this point it's just a simple matter of following directions the developers behind this port are primarily located in China I believe so some of the sentences might take one or two reads but it's still understandable for the most part we're going to download the Android route FS and boot tarballs and dump them into a folder I'm going to call tiny droid I'm going to download you image dot install as well but file I'm putting into the palm folder we created before that's important then we're going to power on the veer plug in the USB cable and mount it as a USB Drive after that we'll drag and drop the Android root FS and boot tarballs to the veer make sure they don't go into a specific folder on the veer just the root level now we're going to reboot the veer while it's starting up though we're going to hold down the up volume key to force it into recovery mode when the veer is safely in recovery mode we'll go back to the computer and open the command prompt by typing CMD at the Start menu will navigate to the palm folder where the nova comm executable and you image install files live and run this command install logs should start scrolling on the veer and that's the last step we should need to take for the installation and once installation is complete we should be taken right into the boot menu here now in order to navigate in this menu we're going to use the volume keys to scroll and the power key to select you'll just select boot into Android and hit power and there you go after a short while we're running Android on the veer as you can imagine this must be this is rather profound as a webOS user to be running Android as you can see we're if I can get to the settings here and show you we are running Android version 2.3 7 Gingerbread and this is an alpha so there's a lot that's not quite working yet namely there's no phone functionality so this is not yet ready to be anybody's daily driver also Wi-Fi connectivity for me was spotty at best it works for some people I've read but it couldn't quite latch on to my home network so with limited connectivity I couldn't really test out anything that relied on the Internet to function in addition there's no Google Play or Android Market functionality yet though there is what looks to be some sort of Chinese variant of some kind in addition the battery life indicator didn't work and so on there's a lot of work yet to be done to make this usable that said it was nice to take a tour around Android on such a tiny device as the vir and the guys who did this port have made some really really nice touches webOS gestures like the up swipe and the back swipe have been implemented and they've been translated to their respective functions which is home and back on Android making it much more usable than your standard Gingerbread also the physical keyboard does in fact function and it still feels just as good as it ever does but if you don't want to use that for the first time ever a webOS device can boast of an on-screen keyboard that's at least usable too bad it took loading another OS to make it happen so that's android on the HP veer now is there a lot of work left to be done yes this alpha build is barely functional but if you look at the history and some of these threads it hasn't taken these devs a very long time to get to this point and if I were to put any money on it I would bet on at least a functional veer coming before the end of the summer now whether anyone would want to install Android on such a tiny device and use it as their daily driver well that's anybody's guess but dual booting is a pretty cool thing and it's really really nice to have options for when webOS can't fill an application need or when Android isn't usable enough for a particular situation anyway this has been Michael with Pocket now give us a thumbs up if you liked the video leave us a comment let us know whether or not you attempted this and what your success rate was like and thanks for watching we'll see you next time