By While we’re all trying to bottle our excitement up about the Transformer Prime and the future of Android 4.0 on it, the Transformer is still a great Android tablet that many owners won’t be trading anytime soon.
While we believe ASUS will be getting ICS going on the device soon enough, it might take a backseat to the Transformer Prime. In the meantime, developers are experimenting with putting the software on the original.
One already has it up and running. Sound doesn’t work and it’s rather slow and buggy, but we’re sure with further development things could be great. To have it up with most radios working is still impressive, though, and we’re excited to see how much better it can get. Watch the video above. [Thanks Johnny!]
Quentyn, its Sunday…stop posting articles and enjoy your Sunday!!! lol
Lol well we’ve been off since Thursday. Just want to catch up ;)
I just don’t get it so i must ask if somebody knows:
Why cant android be installed just like … windows lets say…? or various linux distros? which also runs immediately on different screen sizes, resolutions, hardware?
Why all this hassle with super pcs needed to compile android and maybe hundreds of hours of testing and recompiling of what should be already good to go?
To me this is just stupid, and ios wins here without even a battle! – no i’m not an apple fanboy, i just have an android tablet and cant understand why all this compiling, why cant google release an os which can run immediately on all devices with minimum sys req ( proc type, memory & etc ).
Please enlighten me, thanks!
(also excuse my writing, im not a native english speaker, or writer)
PC’s run on hardware built by separate manufacturers and designed for different operating systems.
these manufacturers then also make drivers for every OS they tend to support (nowadays that would be linux, windows XP, windows vista, and windows 7 in both 32 and 64 bit)
phones/arm tablets are built using custom parts that require custom drivers, which are also integrated into the OS.
a manufacturer of a phone will only make drivers for the OS it intends to run on the device(in this case android 3.X)
if anyone wants to run a different OS like android 4.0, linux, windows CE, or windows 8arm there are no drivers because the manufacturer never intended on running those operating systems on their devices(or is still working on the drivers, in the case of android 4.0)
google can’t really do much about this, it’s up to the people who make the parts to make the drivers and they won’t make drivers just because you want to run an OS they never intended to run on their phone/tablet.
@thedicemaster:disqus thanks for the explanation, that was definitely helpful. Could you explain why there is no abstraction layer so that 3.2 drivers could work with 4.0 software.
The same reason Linux 2.6 drivers don’t work on kernel 3.0 without a recompile. You could add a proxy/abstraction layer for backwards compatibility, but given that certain drivers (phone radio, for example) need to be near-realtime, it makes for a very poor experience.
that would make the OS more bloated.
on lightweight devices such as these you can’t really put too much backwards compatibility tricks in it for drivers as it will take resources that aren’t available in these devices.
a PC has more resources available to handle all kinds of tricks to ensure backwards compatibility with old software.
since these devices are build to run only 1 OS, and to have all OS updates/upgrades handled by the manufacturers, google isn’t going to add bloat to the OS just to make it easier to run newer versions on outdated hardware.
especially as newer OS versions are already starting to become too heavy to run on older devices without adding tricks for improved driver compatibility.
and yes the G1, probably the slowest android phone out there, does already have an ICS port, but don’t expect to open any more than 2 browser tabs on that.
the advent vega with almost 3 times as much ram on honeycomb already crashes on 2 tabs if the pages are a bit heavy.
Actually, there’s something Google could have done. They could have required a common driver pool. That is, any custom driver goes into the general Android pool, instead of being secretive and proprietary.
I hate this too. I should be able to take my android tablet, go to android.com, buy android 4.0 with the android market and google apps and upgrade myself. Its sad in this day in age that i cant
Hmmm. That would be pretty cool if you could do that. Though, there is the whole driver issue. Companies would need to make drivers for all versions of Android, and they don’t want to focus on last years products, or products from 6 months ago for that matter. It would be nice if the components in phones could use standardized drivers. Then the companies wouldn’t need to worry, or at least open source their drivers after say 6 months, then allow modders to make the updates. That would be a better system.
actually, with the way android works manufacturers are already forced to provide at least part of their drivers as open source along with any direct modification to android itself.
but you still need people with the programming skill to rewrite those drivers for newer OS versions.
that is, if the manufacturers actually decide to follow the rules right away.
Every word you just wrote is stupid.
Besides the fact that what you’re describing is IMPOSSIBLE without standardized cell phone parts (which will never happen), how the hell does iOS beat Android in this regard? iOS only runs on a tiny subset of devices. You can’t install iOS on any other phone like you can install Windows on a PC, either, nor could you install iOS on an iPhone without Apple providing the correct drivers, which is exactly why you can’t just install Android on any ‘ol phone and expect it to work right away.
These are custom devices with custom hardware. Android doesn’t provide drivers for every single piece of cell phone hardware (nor does Windows provide drivers for every piece of PC hardware) so it is up to the hardware manufacturers — i.e. the cell phone makers — to provide the drivers to work with the updated OS. There is no way around this and it is no different than what Apple does with iOS.
When I buy a copy of Windows or download a Linux distro, it’s provided compiled for x86 processors and packaged in a neat installer. Every PC/Mac out there use very similar processors. When Google releases a new version of Android into the AOSP, all that they are including is the source code. It’s not practical for them to provide compiled binaries and an installer because there is a wide variety of different hardware out there. Android needs to be compiled and packaged for all the various different types of CPU’s in use by tablets and cell phones.
The job of compiling new versions of Android for the various devices falls on their manufacturers. However, since Android is open source, oftentimes hobbyists get around to it first and provide it as an easily installable ROM you can download from the internet.
Hey I cant seem to find this on XDA or on the page in the youtube description link…. Quentyn, you know where I can get more info on this or a download link?
http://androidair.blogspot.com
Hey
Acer Iconia A500 has a pretty stable build of ICS…… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUSLuQ7sOZA
i like this!!
Cool!
This looks promising.
Ya, I pre-ordered the transformer prime and returned my transformer that I just bought. I thought the prime wasn’t going to be out for awhile so I bought it. Then I found out the release date is 12/9 so I’m like I might as well return this and get the prime. Looking forward to it.
cool
So excited!
right on!
When for the Moto Droid OG?
I like
Bacon.
Can’t wait for a port for my Tab 10.1. There’s far too many ICS teasers. :
Bg
Picked the TF1 up at BB for 250$ over the weekend. Def nice for that price. Can’t wait for a working ICS port.
I’m in the same boat as you. I snagged the very last one. :D
They had plenty when I went to the mobile store.
I knew I saw that price! I tried to go back to find it and everywhere I look it is now at least $350… lucky dog! I wish I had acted fast as I would have given a few away for Christmas
they are $299 at game stop!
Link? Their website says $399. Could have been a cyber monday sale though =/
ICS looks great on the device. Cant wait for its big brother to be released on the market.