Jelly Bean gets ported to Nokia N9

One of the major reasons for Android’s popularity is the operating system’s ability to be hacked to an extreme degree. Developers have now proven how versatile the OS is, by porting it over to the Nokia N9. According to UnleashThePhone, the developers at the NITDroid project have successfully ported the latest version of Android, 4.1 Jelly Bean to the Nokia N9, which originally ran on MeeGo.

The developers have released a video showing that some of the features of the Jelly Bean port work. Though it is unclear exactly what bugs the device may have while running the latest version of Android, it might be stable enough in the near future to use as a daily driver. The developers for Android raise a puzzling question against OEMs like HTC and Samsung: Why does it take so long to update a phone to the latest version of Android?

Earlier this year, we had reported that the N9 was successfully running a build of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. From the videos at the time, it seemed that this “ROM” was a bit glitchy and, as expected, didn’t work in the alpha phase of the ROM's functions like the Camera and Wi-Fi. Things that worked were: the ability to dual boot and choose the OS after powering on the device, 3D drivers, Open GL, rotation, touchscreen, headset buttons, USB networking, LCD off in sleep mode, Alarm, Mounting of  "My Docs" as SD Card, software video decoding, network registration, i.e., phone calls, SMS, Data (GPRS/ EDGE/ 3G), Bluetooth and charging, but without any notifications of how much battery has already been charged.

The Nokia N9 has a 3.9-inches AMOLED screen running at a resolution of 480 x 854, giving the phone a pixel density of 251 ppi. The phone runs on a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and has 1GB of RAM, powered by a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. The N9 sports an 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics.

On the connectivity side, the Nokia N9 has support for Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n. The phone also supports HSDPA speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps. The phone has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and NFC capabilities. The phone is the last Nokia device to run MeeGo.

Now running Jelly Bean

Last month, we had reported that MeeGo will be getting a market for apps, similar to the Google Play store and the iOS App Store. In an interview with a magazine, Managing Director of Jolla mobile Jussi Hurmola announced that MeeGo would be getting a software store where users can get apps for their Meego devices.

Hurmola said that it is clear that Jolla’s next phone needs an ecosystem for third party apps. “We have now published our Qt/QML story but this is not enough. We are all the time building our ecosystem and we will also create a software store where consumers can buy applications for their phone.”

“When the smart phone hits the market, it must absolutely have large number of applications available.” Hurmola also said, “When we will publish the phone, we will also tell more about the availability of applications.”