Android OS on iphone

One of the members of the iphone dev team, planetbeing, ported Android OS (from google) to the iphone. Binaries are available for both 2G and 3G phones (not 3GS). The best part is that the iphone becomes a dual boot. You do not need to completely remove your iphone firmware. However, there are some issues like bugs, performance issues, and power consumption issues. So, in the current state, this is not for the faint hearted. Here is the step-by-step guide to install Android on iphone from pcworld.

Iphone OS 3.0 issues

I wanted to update my 2g iphone from OS 2.2.1 to OS 3.0. I am a little bit apprehensive about upgrading because of the fears that it might have drawbacks or other problems. When I searched the net, I am a bit relieved because I did not find too many complaints. For the time being, I will wait and watch. The most common problem reported is the poor battery performance. See the following snippet from an article in pcmag summarizing the problems.

We received a number of reports from users point to issues with their phones' battery life, slowed speeds, and crashing or a generally inability to run certain apps. A reader named Gary reported that, "[i]t drains my battery in a few hours even if I am not using it." Tom had slightly better luck, writing, "my battery also drains in one day. It used to last three days."

A number of speed issues were reported amongst users, many of whom have considered reverting the software back to its 2.2 iteration. Meanwhile, reader Dave tells us, "most of my iphone apps stopped working after downloading the new 3.0 software on my iPhone 3G." Jason added, "Also Facebook always locks up and won't allow me to move to the desired tab."

Linux on iphone

Like iphone ? Love linux ? Want both of them together ? Then your answer is here. A new project named "iphoneLinux" is going to achieve this. The project is in very infant stage right now. Currently, it provides only a command line interface to interact with the iphone sub-system. You can connect to a terminal over USB connection. The best part of this project is that your iphone becomes a dual boot system (like having windows and linux on the same system). At the boot time you can choose which OS you want to boot into.

For me, the enormous potential in this project is obvious. Speaking at a technical level, currently they have support for access to screen, serial driver, serial over USB driver, Interrupts, MMU, clocks etc. But all the special features of iphone are yet to be brought under the hood. Currently there is no support for wireless networking, touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, baseband etc. Do no slam it down saying that this is useless. It is just about matter of time when they will be supported.

BTW, they are recruiting people for the project. If you are good at kernel hacking and type of guy who figures out things on you own, you can put your head in it. Keep track of their informal blog to get updates about the project.

See this video which shows the boot options and commands in linux terminal.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.