Information Madness

So you have got a new shiny HP Touchpad for yourself and now playing around with it. I have seen many Indians grab the deal of HP TouchPad for $99(16 GB) and $149(32 GB). There are plenty of use of the HP TouchPad. You can watch your home media on your TouchPad, watch Hulu on HP TouchPad, read Kindle and browse/email/youtube. What else do you want from a $99 device?

Right after I bought the HP Touchpad, I noticed that it doesn't support Indian languages. So how to enable Indian languages on HP TouchPad? Here is a quick solution to that problem.

webOS is one of the easiest and most open mobile/tablet platform with coolest homebrew community. There is nothing like JailBreaking for iPhone or Rooting for Android - for webOS . You just turn your webOS device's developer mode ON and you are good to go. So here are the steps to install Indian Languages on your HP TouchPad.

1. Install webOS Quick Install from Precentral. Just follow the instructions there to install WebOSQuickInstall
2. Now turn your webOS developer mode ON by typing "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into "Just Type" box. Click on the Developer Mode App and turn it on. If it asks for password, just keep it blank and save it.
3. Now plug your HP TouchPad to your computer
4. Run the WebOSQuickInstall jar file that you just downloaded. If it asks to install Novacom driver, let it finish.
5. Once the drivers are installed, you will see a device "HP TouchPad"
6. Now Click on  Tools-->Receive File on the WebOSQuickInstall application's menu bar. Enter the file name usr/share/fonts/Heisei_Kaku_Gothic_nb.ttf and select the destination. Make sure you save it at a safe location just in case you screw up and want to reverse it back.
   
7. Now we need to look for the arialuni.ttf under "C:\Windows\Fonts" folder. Most probably you will have this font. Copy that "arialuni.ttf" (keep the file name to all lowercase . remember its .ttf and not .TTF) on your desktop  and rename the file to "Heisei_Kaku_Gothic_nb.ttf". We are basically using the arialuni.ttf as Heisei_Kaku_Gothic_nb.ttf for HP TouchPad.
   
8. Once that's done. Go back to your webOSQuickInstall --> Tools-->Send File and select the Heisei_Kaku_Gothic_nb.ttf (the one we just renamed from arialuni.ttf to) and in destination put -- "/usr/share/fonts" and hit send file .
9. Once that's done. Open your TouchPad browser, go to "Preferences" --> Clear Cookies and "Clear Cache". Now restart your HP Touchpad and you will be able to see all Indian languages on your HP Touchpad including in your apps such as email/messaging/facebook etc. In fact you can actually copy all your favorite indian novels as PDFs and put it on your Box.net account and read it at your leisure

Here are the screen shots that shows Indian languages website and facebook on TouchPad

Updates:

 For those who don't find the above mentioned fonts. Please follow the instructions below

• Visit this URL and download Indian font for TouchPad. Its a password protected file. The password for the file is iHateApple. Its a zip file so extract the file on your local computer. The file is already renamed appropriately.  Just follow the step # 9.