Android on Intel allows Dual Booting with Windows 8
14 April 2013
Melbourne Australia
Loren W
Firstly I am a Technology fan boy. Those that have followed me over the years know this. I own and use daily, and build my own PC. But also use my Macs, and tablets, including Android Nexus 7, 10, and mini iPad. Like Windows Vista, Windows 8, has a marketing problem. I was an early fan of of Windows Vista as I am of Windows 8 but I am the the bubble on that perhaps, being in new tech for 20 years. To evolve and not die they had to go a bit radical, adding almost a separate operating system in an operating system with the new Metro interface. Radical because it was a huge leap from the now more hidden windows desktop. This makes Windows 8 more iOS like, or even more Android like, whilst keeping the more traditional values of Windows intact. Unless you look at Windows RT 8. The bad idea that won’t go away. If anything has confused the marketplace more than what Microsoft has done with RT I cannot remember it. Unless you talk Microsoft Outlook, that is 2 different products in Microsoft with the same name but the confusion is only starting there.
A cou ple of years back I was impressed by a laptop I saw that was an android dual boot windows 7 hybrid. I liked it but it was not easy to go between them. This is a due to something called UEFI Boot. Windows 8 uses this instead of something called BIOS.
Android has not supported UEFI boot, previously, and Intel the chip manufacturer has not supported it via their architecture. What was needed was an version of Android optimized to run on Intel chips.
This has now happened with the release of Android 4.2.2 r1a0. This means you can now run Android on the same PCs, Tablets, and Laptops, you run Windows 8 on.
This has HUGE potential and something I will be installing very soon. The opportunity for Microsoft is to capitalize on the Android momentum on its own devices, or their own either adding Android to a Windows 8 device or vice versa. With Microsoft not having the largest selection of apps in their own library, this would slow the issue as they would gain almost 1m apps instantly.
To do the install you can get started here or read more about it http://bit.ly/115fBNQ
Loren is an Tex-Cali-English hybrid now living in Australia has been in the tech industry for 19 years, his accomplishments include everything from introducing business broadband in 1994 in the UK for British Telecom, SaaS, and Data Centre Services in Australia for NEC Japan and others, debugging iPads for Apple. He has been around so long his 150,000 followers on twitter @mr_internet feel sorry for him and hang around. He likes telling bad jokes and going to cooking schools (20 countries so far) , and speaking 3rd person about himself. He blames not getting enough oxygen as a child for some of this. Ask him about his tenor when BT decided to go after Microsoft IE as BT owned the patent on URLs (it isn’t pretty).
Tech Net TV - 