Watch Android 4.3 running on an x86 Acer laptop
The Android 4.3 AOSP code has been available since last week, and as usual the community immediately set to work making it run on a variety of devices. Today’s installment: an Acer laptop running an AMD Brazos C-50 processor.
YouTube user monstercameron posted a video showing his system booting up the latest version of the Android-x86 Project. His team had a test build of Android 4.3 ready to go just 24 hours after Google released the code.
From what you can see in the video, things appear to be running quite smoothly already. Unreal’s Epic Citadel renders nicely at more than 60fps for the bulk of the run, dipping down to 40fps or so in more detailed sections. That’s not a bad result for a low-end chip that’s muscling through the high performance test.
AnTuTu Benchmark gave the Brazos-powered Acer a score of 11,311. That puts it roughly on par with devices like the HTC One S and Asus Transformer Pad TF300T, at least from a pure benchmarking standpoint.
Intrigued by what you see? The test build of Android 4.3 for x86 processors is available at the project’s website. It’s a very simple process to flash it to an SD card or USB thumb drive for testing, but be aware that it’s still a work in progress.
Certain features that might be important to laptop users don’t work right now, like suspend and resume. There’s also no superuser support, so your favorite root tricks are off limits for the time being. Still, if you want to see how Android 4.3 looks and feels on one of your laptops without doing anything permanent, it’s worth the little bit of time and effort you’ll invest. Just shut down and pull your storage media out, and reboot into your primary OS when you’re done.
Android-x86 releases usually run nicely in VirtualBox too, in case you’d rather go the virtual route.
