Android: It's real!

Vincent Nguyen over at Phone Magazine posted a video of Android software running on off-the-shelf hardware at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The phone, by Chinese manufacturer E28, is currently shipping with Linux and a custom software stack. But E28 says it was relatively easy to port Android to the device, even given its modest specs (200MHz OMAP TI730 chipset with 64MB RAM).

Android runs with no modifications, and the E28 team were even able to download applications coded for the platform from the internet and install them directly to the handset. This, then, is some of that unlocked, open-source simplicity we were promised when the platform was first announced.

E28 showed several Android applications running on the phone, such as Google Maps and the API demo that comes with the SDK. Vincent found the 3d graphics demo particularly impressive. "Wow, that's not bad at all," he said, "It's real! It's running on current hardware and it works really good."