In a recent message sent to the Android Platform mailing list, Andrea Gallo from ST Ericsson says that the company is in the process of porting Android to their U8500 chipset. Andrea goes on to say that they’ve successfully made Android run on a dual core chip version of the U8500 and that they’ve seen no performance loss or instability with the patches they’ve made to the Android source code. The U8500 is built on the next generation Cortex A9 architecture from ARM and is capable of running in a multicore configuration with up to 4 cores. The U8500 is also capable of recording video at 1080p resolution and has accelerated graphics. Earlier this year, in February, ST Ericsson and Nokia formed a partnership to make the U8500 a reference platform for a future Symbian Foundation release. The Symbian folks have already confirmed that the U8500 is crazy fast and powerful. With the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, and soon the Nokia N900 being the first devices to ship with a Cortex A8 chip inside, I have absolutely no idea on when we’re going to see A9 stuff out on the market. More performance is always a good thing, but how much battery life can I realistically expect while recording 1080p video of my friend doing shots at the bar tonight and being slapped in the face for grabbing some girl’s ass?
