Android dual-boot could make Nokia N900 jack of two trades
By Chris Ziegler 
posted January 23rd 2010 6:34PM
posted January 23rd 2010 6:34PM
posted January 23rd 2010 6:34PM
Nokia Maemo 5
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@jonshipman How does Garnet run on the N900? I recall it being quite slow on the N8x0, I'd be interested to know just how much things have improved.
sweeeet deal i am thinking now but the size issue is a big issue for me .............
@timmyjan if it really is better to wait for Maemo 6 and you more sure to see qwertyless Maemo phones because of the multitouch.
Damn! I just ordered my Nexus One too. Could have had an N900 and have the best of both open worlds (Maemo 5 and Android)
@prewreckless
Damn dude you fucked up with the Nexus One. I loved the phone at first myself... well we'll all see why come a few weeks from now on all the tech blogs.
@Anticrawl
This is something you can't tell us all now?
did 'real and spectacular' make anybody else think of an old seinfeld episode?
The thing is that i would want to be able to use Maemo in my Nexus one :D Oh well i'm waiting for Maemo 6. That should be amazing.
@Pdexter
Given how this hack was executed, you wouldn't be able to do this on the Nexus One since it only has a single MicroSD slot. The N900 has 32GB internal plus the MicroSD slot.
VMWare is working on this.
http://gizmodo.com/5420663/vmware-your-next-smartphone-might-run-two-oses-at-once
maemo is more open than android, IMHO
I wonder how it works, or if all the functions work
i wish the video showed a bit more.
Now if only they would release a N900 with AT&T 3g bands... Ah well in my dreams they might.
I like at as a showcase for the N900 and its abilities. But I would not want to actually use Android on my Maemo device.
Maemo on the N900 is actually really good. Just think of the great browsing experience which makes many apps competitors use just obsolete!
How did he disable quiet boot?
@(Unverified), by editing the bootmenu.sh, it runs when you boot with keyboard open and you can make a custom boot sequence from there.
"Android dual-boot could make Nokia N900 jack of two trades"
A whore?!
@kwiiboy
LOL, Naughty Nokia
N900 is such a powerful device..it may run linux android, windows and even OSX.
love it!
To be honest the Android UI looks kinda dated in the video....anybody know which version of Android got booted up in there??
The problem with Android is the unnecessary hamstringing by Google of sticking with some 'Java like' language running on a VM. I was really surprised by the sophistication of the apps available for Maemo5 after the last update pushed by Nokia - really surprising considering the device was launched less than 2 months ago. But then having a PC desktop like debian based system with multiple language support must have helped with the porting. Android really needs to have mainstream language support otherwise after a while we will get iPhone-like 10000 versions of a fart app.
@naashak, it's a bit modified Android 1.6.
@incognito
hmm...seems like it. The UI in Android 2.0 and beyond looked much better to me so I was kinda surprised.
mmmm ...Droid + N900=AWESOME!!!!
Now we just need that VMWare-for-ARM that was demo'ed on the N800 a while back. Then you can run them both at the same time (and possibly also Ubuntu-ARM).
So mobile phones are becoming more and more like PCs. A good thing, no?
@madmac
In addition, I am afraid Google took a few arrogant unwise steps such as launching the Nexus One as a subsidized phone and then the whole China drama where they withheld Motorola and HTC from their imminent Android phone launches. I don't think this is evoking any confidence in other mainstream phone manufacturers who might be questioning their 100% support to a platform which is at the mercy of Google's whim. One might argue that Android is free but in order to make commercial products on it which have differentiating features, you need access to Google.
Android filled a vital gap as being the 1st mass market touchscreen optimized smartphone OS which could be adopted widely. Otherwise you only had iPhone OS at one end and Symbian with S60v5 at the other end. Unfortunately if Google doesn't play it right and keeps taking unilateral decisions, they might just give enough time and leash to Nokia to rebound with Maemo and Symbian^3 to relegate Android to becoming another WinMo.
I love my n900
N900 seems to be still sold out in most parts of Europe. I wonder if Nokia has component delivery problems or if it really is so popular.
Maybe we will get some numbers next week with Q4 results.
Now he just needs to port a capacitive screen.
@AABacon
People keep saying that so much that I actually believed it myself before I bought mine. After using N900 for two months I have changed my mind.
Sure capacitive is more sensitive and multitouch is nice. The best feature of N900 is still the web browser and for that the resistive seems to be better.
Resistive screen allows the use of stulys and is really accurate. That means that for web surfing you can just click on those tiny links without zooming even at this resolution. Pinch zooming is nice but I would rather not zoom at all. Not smudging screen when using stulys is a nice plus.
@AABacon
The screen resolution is way too high for a capacitive touchscreen.
Capacitive screens only work good in ultra low resolution because they are very mprecise. For anything higher than 480*320 a resistive screen is much better especially when it comes to surfing the web because you don't always have to zoom in to click on a link.
This has made me curious about the feasibility of an Android compatibility layer on Maemo. Being that they're both Linux-based, there's some commonality between them. I wonder if it would be possible to port Dalvik and the NDK libs over and run Android apps natively. There would obviously be some incompatibility on hardware-specific stuff but I would be interested to know how feasible it would be and what kind of compatibility would be possible.
@Ravnos, Davik is currently getting ported for Ubuntu, once that's done it wont take long to port it to Maemo as well (the only difference would be the low-level code execution targeting ARM instead of x86, and that part could be actually copied straight from Android)...
I don't know, I've been running Debian Lenny on my N900 for about a month now, I know it's just another variation of linux system but I'm still kind of dual-booting so would this make it triple booting device?
I've been waiting for this since I learned about the N900. Android "runs" on earlier Maemo devices, but they really don't have the power to make it really worth anyone's time to take past a tech demo state and polish it.
It's probably worth pointing out that, while porting Debian programs to Maemo can be a challenge, there's already a Debian distro available for Armel processors. It can be installed and accessed in a chroot, without rebooting. People are using Open Office, The Gimp, and the full desktop Firefox on their N900s. Patient people, that is. Big desktop programs are slow to start up on the N900, but they can be used.
dont jump on me for asking this , but is it possible to run windows ce or win mobile 6.5 or even apple iphone os ? on the device as these os do if i remember right have arm support ?,if yes then i am 100% getting this phone to have a phone that does have the freedom to install what ever you want on it,has finally arrived !!!!! ??????
Yo I wish they would make something like this for satio!
This is interesting.
Just another post about the n900 that pisses me off that there is no ATT band
@naashak What most people don't understand. US is one of the weakest smart phone purchasing countries in the world. People over here don't buy unlocked phones. its not common!! even most of us geeks don't even do it. Nokia is supreme ruler in most of the world when it comes to any form of phone ro smart phone. Nokia sells millions of smart phones a year. they completely crush google and apple and rim. (from a numbers stand point) Android was not, is not, and never will be a contender to Maemo. Nokia has stated this in the past. when every one was at that openhandset alliance conference wondering why nokia was not jumpin on the band wagin. If maemo 5's development phone(n900) is better?/more versatile/easier to develop for/a device a actual developer would want to use...... than every thing now and every thing in the for see-able future. What are people going to complain about when Maemo 6 device has bigger i higher resolution capacitive screen. faster processor and thinner design. and the biggest phone company's support. its over with. all im tryin to say is nokia is and always will be the big man on campus. Don't underestimate its dominance. Nokia is a phone company. its not a niche computer company hell bent on controlling your phone(apple), neither is it a search engine company that care more about profit than features and quality(google) this is thier specialty. and no one is better. Maemo doesnt need mass market share at this point. all it needs is developers, developers, developers. And the N900 has attracted that. How many fart apps on the N900????? zilch. and im happy with that.
It'd be nice to be able to run them in parallel, so that you could quickly switch back and forth between them for certain apps. Otherwise, it might be kind of a pain to reboot your phone every time you wish to use an app in the other OS...