HP TouchPad tablet may have gone past its 15 minutes of fame as a webOS device, but Google's latest version of its Android operating system may bring the TouchPad back to life. According to news surfaced on Thursday, Aug. 2, on the XDA-Developers forum, an unofficial port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean CyanogenMod (CM) 10 custom ROM is available for the discontinued TouchPad.

Hewlett Packard's webOS-powered TouchPad has been discontinued and is mostly a niche gadget, but it's still a solid device. It sports a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB/32GB of storage. After being dismissed as a webOS tablet last year, the TouchPad managed to gain the attention of Android users when Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and then Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, landed on the device. Now, an early version of Android Jelly Bean 4.1 is reportedly finding its way onto the TouchPad ahead of other, more popular devices, including Google's own Nexus 7 which launched recently.

On the other hand, TouchPads with this early Jelly Bean CM10 build have a number of features and capabilities that are not included yet. According to Liliputing, tests found that the mic, camera, and audio on the Jelly Bean-based TouchPads don't work. The hardware video and graphics acceleration are not working very well either. The testers at Liliputing also noted that some reports state the TouchPad no longer charged properly after getting the CM10 Jelly Bean build, but said they had no problems with charging.

"In other words, you can't really use the TouchPad to listen to music, stream movies from Netflix or YouTube, or play most 3D games yet," reads the Lliliputing review. "But you do get some of the improvements in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean including a smoother, faster user interface, notification improvements, and a more accurate keyboard."

If you don't want to risk porting a troublesome build on your TouchPad, you may want to wait until a more stable version comes out and fixes at least some of those glitches. If, on the other hand, you want to try out the CM10 port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, you can download it from the XDA Developers Web site.