Nokia N9 gets Ice Cream Sandwich and Meego dual-boot hack

What’s more fun than modding an Android smartphone? Well, lots of things, but one of them is modding a competing smartphone to run Android. There are many who admire Nokia’s beautiful hardware and industrial design, but lament its home-grown software (or the Windows Phone 7 platform they’re now stuck with). A group of like-minded modders at the NITDroid forums dedicated to bringing Android to Nokia hardware have shown off their latest and certainly greatest project: fully functional Android 4.0 on the MeeGo-powered Nokia N9.

This is no small job, either. All the essential functions of the phone are working, including calls, texts, data, WiFi, Bluetooth, et cetera. Sound and video are working fine, though YouTube playback seems a little choppy. The only real features that seem to be missing are the camera (wasn’t mentioned in the forum post) and automatic rotation (though the accelerometer is working, so that could be just a matter of time). The ROM is in its first Alpha release, so expect a lot of the bugs to be ironed out eventually.

The best part is that this ROM can be installed with a custom boot partition, preserving the original MeeGo OS in a fashion similar to the Android ports on the HP TouchPad. There’s even a work-around method that allows users to mount MeeGo’s My Documents folder as Android’s virtual SD card, giving some rudimentary cross-platform file access. This isn’t quite the same as getting Android on Nokia hardware like many of use were hoping for last year, but it’s about as close as we’re likely to come.