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Google’s Android operating system may designed for low-power devices with touchscreens including smartphones and tablets. But that doesn’t mean you can’t run it on a laptop or desktop computer.
While Android has officially supported Intel’s low-power smartphone chips for a while, there’s also an unofficial Android-x86 project which ports Google’s mobile operating system to run on standard PC hardware.
When Google released Android 4.3 (http://www.windows8newsinfo.com/smf/index.php?topic=23947.0) last week, the team wasted no time getting it up and running on x86 hardware. A test build of Android 4.3 for x86 is already available.
The test build is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean source, and features a 3.10.2 kernel and support for hardware-accelerated graphics on devices with AMD Radeon and Intel graphics chipsets.
This is still a test build and not everything works. Suspend and resume aren’t yet supported, and there’s new Superuser (root) access. Most other features seem to work.
You can take a test build for a spin by downloading a liveCD image from the Android-x86 page. Or just check out this video of the softwrare running on a Acer Aspire 522 mini-laptop with an AMD C-50 processor.