Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich ported to the $25 Raspberry Pi

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgJ7yck1qwY&feature=player_embedded]

We already knew Google supported the Raspberry Pi’s goal of bringing inexpensive and programmable hardware to everyone when Eric Schmidt announced some education investments would go toward purchasing the hardware and providing them to educators as teaching aids. However, we get word from the Raspberry Pi foundation today that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has now been ported to the $25 ARM GNU/Linux box. The announcement confirmed “hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly,” but audio is still missing thanks to AudioFlinger support issues. The blog post continued:

This implementation uses a different kernel and VideoCore binary image from the one available on GitHub, which is why we’ve been keeping quiet about it so far. We’re investigating the feasibility of converging the two code lines to produce a single common platform as soon as we can, at which point we hope to release the sources for you to play with.

EuroGamer pointed out that there have been previous, unsuccessful attempts to bring Android to the Raspberry Pi, which packs 256MB of RAM and a 700MHz single-core processor, but the results of the latest port demoed by developer Naren Sankar in the video above are quite impressive for a $25 device.