Submitted by Console OS, the Kickstarter project to release a distribution of Android specifically for regular PCs, has seen its first release. Sadly, for now, it only works with a relatively limited set of machines, so I can’t try it out for you and tell you what it’s like. I imagine it is not all that dissimilar from hooking a keyboard and mouse up to any other Android device, but it does add the ability to show two Android applications side by side. Additionally, it’s based on KitKat and comes with the Google Play Store.
Interesting, but for now, the limited hardware support makes it hard to actually try it out. I’m intrigued though, and would really love to use it.
What ChromeOS should always have been.
Agreed.
I travel a lot across Europe and never saw a single one being used in the wild across the usual wlan spots, but lots of them sales action to clean up stocks here in Germany.
I believe they are only on Amazon US top sales, and not anywhere else in the globe.
I was looking for a cheap laptop with 9+ h battery life as a terminal for remote work (VNC/RDP/SSH) and it turned out an ARM-based Chromebook was the best available option. I am quite happy with it.
So you got it as a cheap laptop, not to use Chrome as an OS, I imagine.
No different than buying Windows, replacing it with GNU/Linux and then stating lots of Windows PCs are being sold.
Interestingly, ChromeOS has got a built-in ability to run Android apps.
I don’t get the point of this OS. Mobile apps are mostly limited in feature set, overly isolated, duplicative (every app that has to do anything with files includes its own file manager) and tailored for input devices that are not common on PCs. I just can’t imagine a reason why I would ever want to run Android on my laptop.
Interestingly, most of backlash against Windows 8 was based on the fact that Microsoft was forcing mobile/tablet UI on desktops and laptops. And now, when everyone is tired of bashing Windows 8, they pay money for the same thing in Android flavor.
“Pay money”?
On the other hand, tablets are adopting the concepts pushed by Microsoft of detachable keyboards and parallel applications.
Asus Transformer might have been one of the first, but they all fail short of how Surface does it.
Transformer product line is already quite old, and I have a strong impression that it does not really dominate the tablet market, or even the segment of similarily priced devices.
Couldn’t they take advantage of a lot of Linux’ hardware support?
If I was writing an OS, the first thing I would target would be a virtualized environment (VirtualBox, VMWare, etc.).
Nvidia and AMD graphics drivers are written against X11, while Android needs drivers written against surfaceflinger.
Also, Android drivers need to be linked using Bionic libc not GNU glibc.
Thanks. Didn’t know that and was why I was curious.
They could use libhybris.
The only thing from GNU/Linux that Android uses, is exactly Linux, the kernel.
Everything else, including drivers, is Android specific.
Okay – their table of comparison is a little “special”. I’ve used Android on x86 a few times and the Google Play store was determinately included in the version I had. This was back when KitKat was released, and I think the image was ICS, but it def worked.
The other thing, they list a feature they haven’t even released as a plus for their platform – a feature no one has seen work…. o rly?