Raspberry Pi To Come In Ice Cream Sandwich Flavor
Good news for the fans of the smallest and cheapest computer on earth. Developer Naren is now working to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich running on the credit card sized Raspberry Pi computer. Previously, a non-accelerated port of the Android 2.3 Gingerbread version was achieved on top of the VideoCore binary.
“Naren has been working on a port of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to Raspberry Pi, and as you can see from the screenshots and video below, he’s been making great progress. Hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly for some time; AudioFlinger support is the only major missing piece at the moment.”, says eden in the blog post. “This implementation uses a different kernel and VideoCore binary image from the one available on GitHub, which is why we’ve been keeping quiet about it so far. We’re investigating the feasibility of converging the two code lines to produce a single common platform as soon as we can, at which point we hope to release the sources for you to play with.”
The Raspberry Pi is a stripped down piece of basic hardware components, so small that you can easily hold it in your palm. Presently, the system runs only on Linux and includes an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, two USB ports, and an SD card slot. The Raspberry Pi uses a 700 Mhz ARM chip to power it, to be energy and cost efficient and carries 256MB of RAM memory.
The $35 computer has been in high demand ever since it was released and has been mostly out of stock. Production is still running behind demand.
With a planned Ice Cream Sandwich debut, the deal will be sweetened further as this will let users enjoy the many benefits of Android OS and the accompanying apps on their television sets. $35 to turn your dumb TV into a Smartone. Who wouldn’t want that.
