Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel Porting Android To x86 For Netbooks and Tablets

Posted by timothy on from the which-dessert-will-you-have? dept.

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.

6 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. if you want to put it on your machine now by yincrash · · Score: 5, Informative

    1.6 has been ported by the community for some time now.
    http://www.android-x86.org/

    1. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by yincrash · · Score: 4, Informative

      oh, and i guess it isn't mentioned in the summary, but the port that intel is working on is for 2.2. (but it is mentioned in the article, as well as android-x86)

    2. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      Probably not, but I hope they will at least write drivers for their own wireless cards that are in use in existing netbooks (mine has WiFi from Intel).

  2. OLPC/Android is coming by mswhippingboy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:What power advantage? by Rising+Ape · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:But do apps work with x86? by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    But will current android apps with this port? In other words, are apps interpreted or binary?

    If they are binary, then google has to make sure developers make a universal binary, like apple did with their PPC->intel transistion.... or this effort will be DOA.

    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...