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Android 4 Coming To the Raspberry Pi

Posted by Unknown on from the working-down-the-feature-list dept.

SmartAboutThings writes "Raspberry Pi ... might be getting a functional Android port real soon. According to a post on their official blog, they have managed to port almost all the basic functions of Android 4.0 on Raspberry Pi, besides audio support. This comes after the Raspbian OS has been released for Raspberry Pi, and it promises to be 40% faster." For anyone hoping for source to the graphics accelerator, you're still out of luck: everything video related is still implemented using a blob.

1 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe not that lightweight by Fallingcow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It continues to amaze me that modern "light weight" operating systems are so much more resource hungry BeOS was, doing essentially the same tasks—especially since they get to offload so much basic UI work to the graphics chip!

    My phone's much more powerful than my old Pentium 133Mhz machine w/ 64MB RAM (luxury, I know) was, yet BeOS on that clunker was 100x more responsive and less prone to weird UI bugs, brief hangs, and outright lockups than my Android phone. iOS is (a lot) better, but still very greedy and bloated by comparison.

    Then again, it ran circles around its contemporaries in the desktop operating system arena (including Linux), so maybe it was just so good that it's asking too much to expect even a company with vast resources to write something comparably nimble and capable.