Loading ...You may not have heard of E28, but they have something particularly rare on show at the Mobile World Congress: a current, off-the-shelf handset that’s running Google’s Android cellphone platform. I stopped by to shoot some video and find out exactly how well the Android OS works, away from reference designs and hardware test-beds; remember, this is basically E28’s E2831 quadband GSM smartphone, with WiFi, a 2.2-inch QVGA touchscreen and 1.3-megapixel camera, entirely stock aside from the OS. The good news? Android works pretty damn well indeed.
Check out the video of the E28 Android phone in action after the cut!
What makes this particularly interesting is the specs of the E2831: it uses a relatively old OMAP TI 730 chipset, running at just 200MHz, and has a mere 64MB RAM and 64MB ROM. Android runs with no modifications - this is the version of the OS publicly released on the Android site - and the E28 team were even able to download applications coded for the platform from the internet and install them directly to the handset. In fact, the only attention necessary was in making sure the handset’s existing Linux BSP (board support package) was compatible with the Android OS. This, then, is some of that unlocked, open-source simplicity we were promised when the platform was first announced.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Wow, that is very impressive. Running alpha software on a six months old low end smarthpone that was not designed for the os and looking this smooth and good and even fully functional (GSM, GPRS, WiFi, Touchscreen etc.)!
February 12th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Meh. This is exciting for phone OEMs looking for a half-decent suite of cheap standardized tools, but as an iPhone owner, I have to say…That’s IT?
February 12th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
A few questions:
Is this phone available in the US? What does it take to install Android once one has the phone?
Thanks.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
madgunde:
as a non-iphone owner I have to say, how’s your Apple purposefully-crippled EDGE only connection?
February 12th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
@ iPhone people:
True, the iPhone has more features and is slicker and has tech support but you pay for it through the nose and you’re carrier locked and everything is proprietary. Android is NOT for the kind of people who would buy an iPhone. iPhone is to rich metrosexuals as Android is to code hackers and phone geeks. Android is still in development so of course it has less functionality, but just wait till it matures. It being an open platform people will be constantly writing apps to do everything imaginable.
This is very exciting!
February 12th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Hey do you think this will work on the iphone? I mean I got the iphone and it’s a piece of crap, this looks much better
February 12th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Thats all you have to say about it? The iphone is getting 3G. The reason they didnt release the phone with 3G at first was because of the drastically reduced battery life. So yes they did release the iPhone with EDGE only on purpose.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Also as a non-iphone owner I have to say, how’s your video recording look?? Oh wait, the almighty iPhone can’t take video, something my free 7 year old brick phone could easily do. Hmmm……
February 12th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
@Miguel: As another iPhone user, it’s treating me pretty well over here in New York — and seeing as I have wi-fi available at home and at the office and most places I frequent — I haven’t had much of a problem with EDGE. Thanks.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:52 am
I am a current owner of an E2831, it is an awersome phone even though I use it under the standard UI that E28 offers which is also based on Linux.
The main reason I bought this device is because is a converged phone, meaning that I ghave a cellular phone and a VoIP phone at the same time, and I mean real VoIP, not Skype (although I can run skype via the Iskoot java client). I have the E2831 set up as a remote extension of my asterisk PBX, so whenever I go I can receive phone calls from my pbx (if wifi is available and I can call using either my cell provider or via VOIP, what ever is more convenient. Iphone may be attractive for other reasons but as convergent device this is much better, now with android available in the same platform sky is literally the limit. You can get the E2831 in Ebay for around $370.
February 14th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Ramiro, I realise it might be tricky to judge, but how does Android running on the E2831 compare speed-wise to the native Linux OS your handset is running?
February 15th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Chris,
Hard to tell but I am happy with the E2831 current performance under the native Linux OS. Even though the report says it was a bit sluggish running under Android, it did not seem to me it was, for a touch screen phone that is.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:40 am
So is the Android OS ready to be installed on ANY cell phone? Why don’t those guys at zzzPhone solve their OS issues by installing Android right now?