Prepare to have your mind blown: Thanks to the work of a hacker, you can now boot Google’s Android operating system on your iPhone.
Someday in the very near future, you might be able to dual-boot your iPhone to run Google Android in addition to iPhone OS, thanks to the work of hacker “planetbeing,” who’s already got the open-source mobile operating system successfully running on his original iPhone, complete with his own custom OpeniBoot software to manage booting into either iPhone OS or Android.
The Android dual-boot hack is largely thanks to planetbeing’s earlier work on porting the Linux kernel to the iPhone, which didn’t prove to be terribly useful -- until now. The YouTube video (embedded below for your viewing pleasure) demonstrates the entire process, from shutting down the iPhone and booting into the custom OpeniBoot software and launching into Android.
Once inside Android, planetbeing demonstrates some common functions such as initiating a Wi-Fi connection, web browsing, playing music, receiving an SMS and even answering a call to the device, which is running with the hacker’s own Rogers SIM card.
Although the Android port looks quite smooth, planetbeing calls it “alpha quality” at the moment. But you can help with pushing the project along, either through donations or even some code (if you’re an enterprising programmer with nothing else to do). For now, the dual-boot only runs on the original 2G iPhone, but planetbeing claims it should be fairly easy to port over to the iPhone 3G (he anticipates more work to get it working on the 3GS).
We can’t help but picture the look on poor Steve Jobs’ face when he hears about this…
Nice - See some innovation instead of whining. Kudos to the hack/crack community for continuing to revolutionize what I tend to see as nothing more than commodity hardware of the future.
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