A little Ice Cream Sandwich to go with that Raspberry Pi

posted on Aug 1st 2012 by Kevin Krause

The tiny and inexpensive Raspberry Pi just got a lot more interesting for Android fans. The team has been hard at work porting Android 4.0 to the $25 computer, bringing all the functionality of Ice Cream Sandwich to the device and opening up access to thousands of applications and games. The build is not quite ready for primetime — full audio support is still missing — but hardware accelerated graphics and video have been successfully implemented.

The folks at Raspberry Pi are keeping the build private for now. It’s use of a different kernel and VideoCore binary makes the release a bit trickier to manage, but once everything is taken care there will be little stopping you from booting up Android 4.0 on the device.

[RaspberryPi via TheVerge]

About The Author
Kevin Krause is a Contributing Editor for Phandroid.com and has posted 5882 articles. Connect with him on G+.

Matthew Merrick

phone UI for the FAIL.
it should use the android desktop/tablet UI and tablet apps, would make exponentially more sense.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1077593806 Charles Wolfe
  
  Totally agree, maybe they want to keep it familiar looking (like the Nexus tablet does) or maybe the build isn’t final yet and they plan to do this?
  - Brian S.
    
    I hope they use pure stock Android as well.
- arj_85
  
  Can’t say that I agree with you. Opening up the Android OS on this hardware has immense benefits. Mostly, it’d make a great little Media center with the upcoming XBMC app for android. If you check sites like ebay there’s a real good market for ‘Android TV Box’ which sell for a lot more than the Raspberry Pi.
  
  Also, if you don’t like the UI, just install one of the may linux distros available for the Pi!
  - Matthew Merrick
    
    I never once said that android on the Pi was a bad thing!
    it is a simple fact that use of the android phone UI vs the tablet UI fundamentally changes the user experience.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1077593806 Charles Wolfe

Kinda wish they put this effort into Jelly Bean instead
- Montisaquadeis
  
  Once get ICS fully working it shouldnt be that hard to get JB up and running on the little device.
- Brian S.
  
  They probably started with ICS a while ago and JellyBean wasn’t out yet. And rather than starting over they did this.
  
  Plus, what @Montisaquadeis said is true.
Brian S.

CHEERS!
wushang681

tinyurl.com/cyk9xz2

A little Ice Cream Sandwich to go with that Raspberry Pi

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