For a phone that never really had a fair shot to be successful, cursed to launch as the lone handset on a dying platform, the Nokia N9 has been surprisingly prolific. Perhaps more than in any other way, it’s the phone’s design that has had the most influence in shaping the direction of the company’s follow-up work on Lumia-series Windows Phone handsets. To a dedicated group of users, the N9 is undervalued hardware worth fighting for, and they’ve been hard at work looking for ways to expand its functionality. One of the most ambitious projects is to bring the latest version of Android to the handset. While we’re still a way’s off from anything resembling a daily driver, it’s still interesting to see just what’s been accomplished towards getting Ice Cream Sandwich running on the N9.
As shouldn’t be much of a surprise, one of the biggest issues is getting together Android drivers for the N9′s hardware. Without similar models to borrow code from, it’s an uphill battle getting the likes of the display to behave properly. Recent updates have made progress, but there are still significant portions of the system that are just flat-out broken at the moment.
The ultimate goal would be to have a fully-working version of Android 4.0 that could co-exist on the phone with MeeGo, letting you choose between the two platforms at boot.
