Ice Cream Sandwich coming to Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi  - a tiny, inexpensive, Linux-based computer designed to teach kids and adults programming techniques - is to get a port of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

One of the project's team has been working on getting the open source operating system to work on the credit card-sized computer for a while and has almost finished. As the official Raspberry Pi blog states, hardware-accelerated graphics and video are already up and running, all that's left to implement is AudioFlinger support (ie, sound).



When this is added, there will be great potential for the Raspberry Pi to be used as an Android-based media centre and games console. Certainly, the video capabilities could be interesting, although it is worth remembering that the Pi only has a 700MHz ARM single core processor, which puts it firmly into the realms of the lower end of Android handsets in terms of power and speed.

It does have a HDMI output, though, and an SD card slot, so they could be utilised to hook up to a TV and memory capacity respectively. And at $25 a computer, it could well be worth a punt when the team finishes its ICS build.