Android


akarolick

akarolick

Member
Joined
Oct 13, 2009
Messages
149
Hey all just writing in to report that I have android 2.0 running great on my Beagleboard and I can't wait to port it over to my panda. Anybody interested in messing with it once I do? it works REALLY well and crazy fast.
 
I would certainly love to have Android as a boot option on my Pandora.... only if it's just for playing a bit with it.

Seeing how Android is becoming a popular platform and the amount of software for it increasing steadily, I am sure there will no lack of interest.
 
It would be a secondary for me too (no need to screw up the base load). I would just boot it from the sdcard and not change the NAND at all. it is a really cool os. I may have to track down a usb based accelerometer. that would really complete the whole setup as a lot of the games depend on it. I have a g1 an d a moto droid and the droid is amazing. so running adroid on something even faster was awesome.
 
I'm interested. Not really for everyday use, but I'm getting into some Android development for school soon, and my Pandora could potentially make things easier.
 
The droid is powered by a TI omap3 and has 256mb memory... so it's pretty similar hardware wise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid

The Cortex A8 processor is apparently running at "only" 550 mHz on the droid but it's not really a huge difference.

If there is a big speed difference then it would be software related I guess. Obviously the droid has to handle the phone stuff in android. (no idea if that make much difference, just saying)
 
I was surprised too but even the people at google admit to the fact that 50 Mhz makes a BIG difference. Plus there is the notable fact that all of the telephony crap isn't running so you have a much leaner load... not that there are any memory constraints on the droid as far as that goes, right after a reboot it has over 110MB of ram free. I really think you all will be pleased with how it runs it is a great platform.
 
Does Android have any particular kernel requirements? I mean, if I can just unpack it onto an SD and fire it up with our existing Pandora kernel, that'd take onyl 10 mins to unpack a tarball over my current PAndora ansgtrom image. If thats all it is, I'll give it a shot ;)

jeff
 
Well I haven't tried it with a previously installed linux kernel. I think it would require a lot of effort in order to get it working properly. After all it is pretty much a java layer running on top of a linux kernel it would probably be doable but I think it would be difficult to get running in that fashion. the whole thing takes up under 100MB so that would be a lot of work for not much gain. But the current supported kernel is 2.6.31.
 
DuckMan said:
I was surprised too but even the people at google admit to the fact that 50 Mhz makes a BIG difference. Plus there is the notable fact that all of the telephony crap isn't running so you have a much leaner load... not that there are any memory constraints on the droid as far as that goes, right after a reboot it has over 110MB of ram free. I really think you all will be pleased with how it runs it is a great platform.
Click to expand...

I don't buy this. Unless something else is different - say, other clocks - then a 550MHz OMAP3530 will at worst be ~8.3% slower than a 600MHz one.

You might be confusing this with 600MHz OMAP3530 vs the standard 528MHz Qualcomm ARM11 Androids. Those are going to be a ton slower.

Re Android Linux: you can't run it on top of a stock kernel. You need to use a kernel that has been patched for Android. If I recall correctly from Google's presentations, there are some 150 or so patches to be applied before building.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have a droid and I have a beagleboard running android. Both are running android 2.0.1 and it runs smoother on the beagleboard. I just built it from source, and don't know what specifically Moto might have added so that might be slowing it down. other than that I'm not really sure what specifics you are looking for.
 
I dont like Google that much, but I would really like to try Android on the Pandora just for the fast and finger friendly browser :)
 
mali said:
I dont like Google that much, but I would really like to try Android on the Pandora just for the fast and finger friendly browser :)
Click to expand...

For a fast and finger friendly browser try the one included in Maemo 5. It's also optimized for a 800x480 screen.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Is it fully open? Microb in Maemo 4 was closed, but I didn't follow the recent fremantle discussion because I dislike the N900 tabletphone.
 
mali said:
Is it fully open? Microb in Maemo 4 was closed, but I didn't follow the recent fremantle discussion because I dislike the N900 tabletphone.
Click to expand...

Oh, crap. I remembered it was, but now that I look at the repositories it seems to be closed after all :(. Sorry for the mixup.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So just curious, is this an interesting POC to have as an alternate boot option, or potentially an actually useable alternative to Angstrom?

From what I understand, having Android would not give us the App store or any of the Google specific app stuff and that it would be slower and less adaptable than Angstrom. So is there any reason to have it other than it's cool?

Not trying to diminish the effort, just trying to work out if it would be right for me. wasn't there also some discussion about just getting Android apps to run on the Pandora without all the tedious rebooting?

a
 
Almost certainly not an alternative to angstrom but it is really cool. this will let you play all of the stuff that gets ported over to the Odroid. it is not however a full linux distro and would require a lot of work to get stuff running on it due to the Java heavy nature of the platform. All of this work would be portable to the Odroid though and I think I will be working a lot to help out their community. and hopefully making a better device for them :)
 
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