Saturday, July 09, 2011

Android on the O2 Joggler

A while back I purchased an O2 Joggler off eBay (I missed it in the shops when O2 discontinued it and dropped the price down to £50 - fortunately that was around the going rate for one on eBay when I got mine, so I didn't loose out much).  While out of the box it is still fundamentally flawed, it has long since been hacked into something potentially useful.

For awhile I was running Ubuntu on it, and while it worked it still felt like you really needed to connect a keyboard and mouse to make the most out of it. Recently a build of Android x86 Froyo has come out for it, so I decided to give it a spin. I have to say that after installing Froyo, you realize how the Joggler should have been an Android device from the start.

I'm hoping to get Android running on the internal 1Gb flash (I've got it booting off a 1Gb USB pen drive, so I'm hopeful) and then using a low profile USB drive (something like this) as the "SD Card" (in the worst case, I could just use the low profile drive for both the OS and the SD card).

It's not perfect - videos seems a bit iffy, apparently there are some issues with external speakers and not every app works or works well - but as a small computer for the kitchen it looks like it finally fits the bill.