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The folks responsible for Raspberry Pi have already concocted a delicious, inexpensive recipe for micro-sized computing, but the project is about to get even tastier with the introduction of one more ingredient: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Raspberry Pi's developers are working on porting ICS to its $35 device and have "been making great progress" towards that end.
"Hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly for some time; AudioFinger support is the only major missing piece at the moment," Raspberry Pi's developers stated in their most recent blog post.
There are other issues to work through as well, but it's all coming along nicely. The developers said that this particular implementation uses a different kernel and VideoCore binary image than the one that's available on GitHub, explaining that's the reason they've kept quiet about it all so far. Once they figure out a feasible way to converge the two code lines to produce a single common platform, they'll release the source code to the general public.
Raspberry Pi is a $35 device the size of a credit card with an ARM processor clocked at 700MHz, VideoCore 4 GPU capable of Blu-ray quality playback, 256MB of RAM, two USB ports, and an Ethernet port. There's also a $25 version that does away with Ethernet and drops one of the USB ports.
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Comments are closed on this article
John Pombrio
August 02, 2012 at 8:24am
Still asking the question. Anyone here actually DOING anything with their Pi or is it still sitting in its packaging?
I shouldn't complain. I have $150 worth of bird's eye maple downstairs "waiting" for me to build a table out of it. And waiting, and waiting...
ApathyCurve
August 01, 2012 at 12:12pm
Meh. ICS was pushed to my Razr a couple weeks ago, and I seriously question why. There's no perceivable increase in performance, and the feature set is so close to being identical to the previous version it's not even worth mentioning the differences. Basically it just forced me to figure out where they'd moved a couple of things -- apparently for no valid reason.
kixofmyg0t
August 01, 2012 at 2:14pm
Troll.
You seriously can't notice the difference between Gingerbread and ICS?!? Yeah right. If you wanted me to list 5 differences between them I'm not sure I can ONLY list 5. ICS is lightyears ahead of GB in every single metric possible.
If you're THAT inept then you really need a iPhone. Those new Apple commercials are made for YOU.
theabsinthehare
August 01, 2012 at 10:28am
It's questionable how smoothly it will run; ICS was built with 1GB of ram in mind. On my Kindle Fire (which has 512MB)the barebones ICS rom uses about 300 to 350MB of ram, and all of the major browsers (Opera, Dolphin, Chrome and Firefox) use anywhere from 70 to 100+ MB each with a page open.
Keeping in mind that the RasPi splits its ram between CPU and GPU at boot, that leaves you with about negative 242MB of ram :P
They must be making a whole lot of modifications and dropping a ton of features.
kixofmyg0t
August 01, 2012 at 10:03am
Since I'm running Jelly Bean now.....its hard to get excited for anything with ICS.
