Nokia N9, a Meego powered smartphone was modded by developers and installed its rival operating system Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)and boot it side by side with Meego-OS.

Modders from NITDroid forum called Project Mayhem was able to get the trick in installing fully functional Android 4.0.3 alpha release on the phone. The Android ROM can be installed with a custom boot partition alongside the existing Meego OS similar to Android porting on HP TouchPad.

The phone was able to function all the Android functionality such as multitouch, 3D drivers and OpenGL, and GSM/3G connectivity are all playing ball. The phone also works on phone’s essential functions such as calls, texts, data, WiFi, and Bluetooth. Sound and video are working fine, though YouTube playback seems a little choppy as reported by Android Community.

The modders also found work-around methods in allowing users to mount MeeGo’s My Documents folder as Android’s virtual SD card, giving some rudimentary cross-platform file access.

Slashgear reported that by using the Android OS the phone was able to recognize the physical volume and power buttons, including recognition of headset buttons and the USB port. The LCD shuts off in sleep mode as you’d expect, and there’s Bluetooth and accelerometer support too. Audio playback works in the earpiece, speaker and through a headset.
But the modded Nokia N9 is still patchy to fully function as Android smartphone but it is still soon to judge since the Android OS is still in beta stage.

Here’s what you get when you mod the Nokia N9 to Android (head to NITDroid Forum for full instructions and links)

Things expected to work:

• dualboot kernel (without reflashing), ability to choose OS after power on.
• 3D drivers, OpenGL
• hwrotation (portrait mode only, accelerometer HAL doesn’t work)
• touchscreen (multitouch)
• hw buttons (volume, power)
• ECI accessory (headset buttons)
• USB networking
• lcd off in sleep mode
• alarm driver, RTC
• mounting MyDocs as “SDCard” [realized; NOT FIXED, but HACK EXISTS]
• basic video decoding (sw) and playback, YouTube (choppy)
• basic CellMo functionality: network registration, USSD, SMS, data (GPRS/EDGE/3G), signaling. Actually, ofono/ofono-ril stack is used: all things that it able to do on the n900.
• Bluetooth (scanning, can pair devices. I didn’t test deeper).
• charging (note: without any notification in UI)
• sensors: accelerometer
• audio: playback (audio routing to: loudspeaker, headset or earpiece)
• lights HAL (lcd brightness)
• root access (via adb shell; su/Superuser.apk)

The successful Android hack between Meego and Android was first reported on Engadget when a Chinese user posted a video of successfully installing Android 2.3.1 (Gingerbread) on Nokia N9 and the same user who also managed to install Windows Mobile on the same phone.

via AndroidCommunity, SlashGear.