Android OS (iDroid) Ported to Dual-Boot and Run on iPhone and iPhone 3G

Which is better, iPhone or Android? Well, if you love to have both mobile operating system, but do not want to spend another hefty sum to buy another piece of smartphone gadget, now a member of iPhone Dev Team, PlanetBeing have managed to came out with an ingenious way to run Android OS on iPhone. Best of all, iPhone is able to dual-boot between iPhone OS and Android OS.

PlanetBeing is the hacker who successfully ported the Linux 2.6 kernel to iPhone in late 2008. The Android on iPhone hack also make use of Linux 2.6 bootloader OpeniBoot which PlanetBeing created to load Linux on iPhone. After installing and booting into Android OS on iPhone 2G hardware, most functions can work properly, including music playback, web browsing, sending or receiving SMS and making phone calls.

However, due to shortage of button on iPhone (as iPhone has only one button), Android OS is been programmed to use volume buttons as the “Call” and “Home” buttons.

Here’s the video clip demonstrates Android OS running on iPhone:

And, the Android OS has also been ported to dual-boot on iPhone 3G, though the process is slightly more complicated. But the end-results are similar, where users can do most phone features including browse the web, send and receive SMS text messages over the cell phone radio, and run any application that does not require audio support (expected to be coming soon though).

Here’s the video demo of iPhone 3G running on Android OS:

The whole project to run Android OS on iPhone is now named as iDroid port, where the main project page at http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/Main_Page, including a guide on how to install iDroid (Android) into iPhone. Jailbreak iPhone is necessary to run iDroid.

Pre-built images and source code (idroid-release-0.1a.tar.bz) can be downloaded using torrent, or from sourceforge.net.