Tech
Android: It's real!
While Microsoft and Nokia continue to dismiss Android as nothing but a "powerpoint presentation" or "press release", Chinese manufacturer E28 has quietly ported Google's phone software stack to their low-end production Linux phone. The result? "Wow," says Vincent Nguyen, who got to see the device in person at Mobile World Congress.
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."