The Wahyudiharto's Blog

More and more mobile Android powered devices enter the market, but the number of netbooks & bigger devices running the Android OS out of the box is still very small. Google itself seems to put more energy in the development of Chrome OS than on porting the droid to the x86 platform. But there is hope! The guys over at android-x86.org are working hard on exactly that task – building Android installer both from LiveCD and LiveUSB. And here below my review of LiveUSB Android running on my Acer Aspire One.

First of all, download LiveUSB Android zipped image from this link, and then extract it using gzip command from Linux. After that, plugged in an empty USB disk and execute dd command to duplicate the image to USB disk like picture below.



Please note that you have to make sure where the target alias for your USB disk (from my experiment, the USB disk is located to /dev/sdb). After the image succeeded transferred, I found that the USB disk has ext2 file system format with several Android boot files on it.



Now, prepare for fresh booting with USB disk still plugged in. Don’t forget to switch USB disk as the first booting. Like the picture below, USB disk will initializing the GRUB boot menu.



For this first try, let it boot from Live USB – even there’s a choice purposed to installing into hard drive. Just wait the process finished to show Android desktop.



This Android desktop has simple menu, even you can operate it only with direction pad, escape & enter key - just similar to the Android OS phone. On the right of the desktop, you will see a panel to switch to show the Android menu – try to open this panel & it will show a group of Android application just like picture below



The first application I’ve tried from this was Camcorder and Camera, and the great is, Android succeeded to detect the webcam hardware. It can show webcam picture smoothly.



From Camera, I also tried the ConnectBot application – the console terminal for advanced user. This application can handle both local and remote terminal.



Next, I tried to open Contacts application. From this I found that Android interpreted the computer as a phone, since there are Dialer and Call log tab on the same module. The weird thing was where the hell is Menu button to add the contact?



Since I found that this OS “emulated” as phone OS, finally I convinced this from Spare Parts menu. And here below picture explain what Android is.



Anyway, the Android desktop also fully equipped with Google search module. It purposed to search anything inside computer or internet, just like Google Desktop Search on others OS. When cursor focused in search box, a virtual keyboard will show. This remained me to On Screen Keyboard from Windows Accessibility ;-). Therefore, I failed to make an attempt with Chrome browser to surf the internet since I couldn’t connect my Huawei USB modem.



After playing around with Android several times, I notice that it’s not stable to run yet since I found a severe window often every time I try to execute some applications.



The last things I can share you up, where the hell is shutdown menu? Well, just like a phone, shutdown or reboot menus will shows once you press the power button. Its kinda weird but more practice for common users.



Conclusion
Android has come as the future netbook OS. At least that’s what they project goal which is to provide complete solution for Android on Eee PC platforms first and then to provide solutions for common x86 platforms as well. Even this project was born 6 months ago, but the development seems to be run rapidly. From my experience on it, Android runs well, quick and fast, more responsive but lack of office application. While network card run as follow on Acer Aspire One – having internet connection from LAN – but it still also missing some of internet application such as messaging service or chatting (this may cause webcam function availability is useless). In addition, while others open source OS equipped their system with separate repository, but I don’t see this on Android platform. We hope that Android developers will pay on this attention to realize their idea soon, so that Android will grown up as clever, light and thin OS for netbook. What do you say?

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Google Android, Review

---

PS: If you've benefit from this blog, you can support it by making a small contribution.