Since late November, the HTC Hero has been featured on the airwaves up here in Alaska. GCI, one of the local phone companies, has been advertising the imminent arrival of Alaska’s first Android-based phone. It didn’t take long for ACS to follow and now both companies are advertising the arrival of Android to Alaska.

The big question is when. ACS hasn’t put a date on their release and GCI is saying on the Alaska Digitel website that they expect to have the phone mid-January. So, potentially, we could be as close as two weeks away from Android in Alaska.

Being the tinkerer that I am, I couldn’t quite wait that long so I started looking around for ways to run Android on other things…anything!

It didn’t take long to find that Android can be run on a regular PC using a Live CD, much in the same way Ubuntu can. Of course, I wasted no time trying that and quickly had a VirtualBox setup with Android running.

Going further, I realized that an even better way to experience Android is through the Android SDK. Using the emulator included here, I can run the different OS versions and tinker around with apps and various other things. Very cool.

Then I found that there’s more. Creative geniuses have managed to get Android to run on older pocketpc devices, such as the PPC6900 and also some newer ones. In theory, this seems to mean that if you’re looking at running Android and even HTC’s Sense on an existing phone, you can, although much slower in most cases.

So, while I’m waiting for the Hero to come and while I contemplate whether I want to give up my Blackberry or not, I tinker with Android on my own. If you’re interested in the same, below are a few links that may be of interest:

Alaska Carriers advertising the Hero:
ACS – http://www.acsalaska.com
GCI – http://www.gci.com

Android SDK – http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
Android ISO – http://code.google.com/p/live-android/


http://www.androidonhtc.com

Android on HTC Google Wave Discussion
Android on HTC Files on Google Wave