Thanks to the work of developer Nick Peck, owners of an iPhone 3G can run Google's Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) on their iPhone. It requires a jailbroken iPhone 3G and a open sourced software called OpeniBoot. Essentially the iPhone is set up to dual boot both Android 2.3 and iOS.
Apparently Android 2.3 runs somewhat sluggish on the 3G (look at the video), but that may be because the 3G is over 2 years old and has much slower hardware compared to current Android and iPhone models. Also consider that Android 2.3 has not yet been released for the myriad of Android phones on the market and will probably require a late model Android phone to avoid sluggish performance.
Although there is no time line announced, developers are working to port Android 2.3 to iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, which would definitely increase performance.
So how useful is this to the average iPhone user? Probably not much at all. This really only benefits iPhone users on a budget who are interested in trying out Android 2.3. When comparing iOS to Android, besides what the kool-aid drinkers say, there really is not much difference in functionality between iOS and Android. They are both excellent mobile platforms, offer thousands of quality apps to do everything from free Wifi phone calls to watching movies online. The biggest difference to the average user between iOS and Android is really the user interface.
What is really notable is the conditions that allowed this to happen in the first place. The fact that the key parts of the Android OS is released under open sourced licenses is what allowed developer Nick Peck to tweak Android to run on the closed iPhone/iOS environment. Unless Apple changes they way they do business, I highly doubt you will see the reverse happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment