David Wong, better known as “planetbeing” of the iPhone Dev Team which produces jailbreak after jailbreak, uploaded this video detailing his rather mature port of Android OS to dual boot natively on the original iPhone:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A&w=480&h=385]
This port, while not mature enough for most people to start relying upon it for their everyday use, is an incredible achievement that has the potential to tangibly change the face of tomorrow’s smartphone market.
Don’t get me wrong: dual booting iPhone OS and Android offers pretty much nothing to the everyday consumer. Even for gadget geeks like myself, its added utility will be nothing more than a cheap trick for showing people 2 OSes, 1 Phone. (Sorry.) But what makes this important is that soon, developers will only have to have one device to develop for both iPhone and Android platforms. And many developers already own the device needed to do so.
This might possibly be a catalyst for even more development on the Android platform, as it will become available to millions of devices that are already in users’ hands. If it catches on, I think we’ll start seeing a much more mature Android Marketplace and a lot more small shops developing dual-platform applications.
This still has a good ways to go before it’s a useful solution:
- This port isn’t of the recent Android 2.0 or even 2.1 releases- rather a 9-month old one.
- It only runs on the original iPhone, with a small user base. planetbeing says porting to the much more popular 3G should be easier, and the 3GS with more work.
- It isn’t a fully-customized port; button functions have funky mappings and it needs to be better integrated to the hardware to become useful.
Overall, planetbeing has done an incredibly impressive job with his port, and I’m surprised this was even remotely possible, much less such a functional port.
planetbeing has hosted the initial pre-built images and source here. Check out his post for more information, and give him a donation if you’re someone who stands to find this port useful.