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Intel Porting Android To x86 For Netbooks and Tablets
According to Liliputing, Intel is bringing the sweet eye candy of Android to x86, which — if all goes well — means it will land on (more) netbooks and tablets soon. I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life, but the more the merrier, when it comes to breaking up the tight circle of OSes available for any given arbitrary class of computing devices. Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe it should be thinking of Android, too.
1.6 has been ported by the community for some time now.
http://www.android-x86.org/
Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe they should be thinking of Android, too.
Funny you should mention that. According to Negroponte, XO-3 will most likely use Adroid. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/one-laptop-per-child-android-meet-dr-negroponte/3976
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
You are aware that ARM *started* as a computer CPU, and a desktop one at that (Acorn Archimedes)? People were doing very serious work on machines with much less power than an ARM mobile processor not so long ago.
Android for x86 -> x86 based tablets
ChromeOS -> netbooks
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Most apps should work. It's just Java, after all!
The ones that need porting are things that have native code in them. In which case they need to be recompiled. Not sure if there exists a universal binary format for Android to support this though, but I'm assuming it's regular ELF at the lowlevel so there's a chance.
There's also MIPS android as well - MIPS wants to get back into the phone game. Would be interesting to see a triple architecture binary...
If you are talking about the type of App that you find in Android Market, those aren't neither binary nor interpreted per se. They run in Dalvik, a Java virtual machine made for hardware with constraints in terms of memory and processor speed (wikipedia). In plain english: yes, they will. No, there are no applications with native code in the Market. If you port kernel, middleware and key applications, every single app in Android Market that runs in Android 2.2 will run in x86.
Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
This advantage seems to have gone away, more or less.
My own Atom-based Netbook can make a battery last all day.
Check this out. Standby time 180 hours. And by standby time, they mean the screen is off. Not "standby" as it is normally meant on regular desktops and laptops whereas the whole thing is off. The advantage there is instant on, not 1 second on, not 2. Instant. And while the screen is off, it can still be doing something. Checking your email, updating your rss feeds, whatever it would normally be doing. Basically, it's a continuous run device like a cell phone. And it's silent. And it generates little to no heat without a cpu fan. It also weighs less than 2 pounds. Your netbook doesn't even remotely compare to this. What's the difference? ARM vs Atom. Atoms aren't even on the same planet when it comes to power efficiency as ARM. Give it 5 years and maybe you can make that claim.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It's not exactly that either. You enter Java - or at least, a language that has the Java syntax, not sure they can call it Java since it isn't J2ME or J2SE. What you get out to actually run on your phone isn't Java bytecode, but Dalvik bytecode.
Dalvik bytecode is portable, too, so it shouldn't be a problem for most apps. But there is also the Native Development Kit, which almost no one talks about... I guess stuff written in that won't be portable.
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