The Android PC —sauce to sugar?
A walk-through the relative merits of Android x86
Android has been the go-to platform of choice for not only cellular handsets but also other devices such as TVs and even in-car infotainment systems, in the present day and age.
A Favorite
Android is open source, hence a bunch of developers working on incorporating new features, porting it for newer hardware and yeah, all that for free. That’s how open source works! And that’s how Android x86 was born. Android x86 is essentially “Android for x86”. For all newbies, x86 refers to the 32-bit architecture of Intel’s CPU line-up while x64 or sometimes amd64 refers to the 64-bit instruction set counterpart. Yet Android x86 is a generalization for Android on all of Intel’s CPU line-up.
Android PC
So if you’ve got a computer with an Intel CPU at it’s heart, which is true in most cases, you’re good to go! You can run Android on your PC. But then question arises, why would you even want to do that? Just because you can and you’re cool. Android’s got a huge market of apps — apps that you use on a routine basis for work and play — apps that sometimes look and feel better than their corresponding websites and Windows counterparts. It’s just too cool to run Android on your PC with those apps that you love — all on a large playground. And if you’ve got a touchscreen say on a Windows tablet — all the more better.
The Goods
The experience of Android on the PC is almost as good as it is, on an Android phone or a tablet. All that huge screen shapes into a typical Android tablet with a reasonable screen pixel density which can be further tweaked to suit your needs — it’s all perfect when it comes to the interface. All apps that are tablets-natives work, except for a few that are buggy thanks to the lack of libraries and optimization on the x86 platform. Off late, Android’s quite optimized for non-touch-based input methods and allows efficient control with a keyboard and mouse. This is what essentially makes Android x86 possible and practical to some extent. Most laptop touchpad (generic) drivers are bundled along, which makes all gestures like swipe and pinch that you’d perform on a typical Android tablet possible with no jitters and lag. All animations are just too smooth to deny. WiFi now supports a bunch of more network cards out-of-the-box and the Killer powered card on my Alienware finally works legit. Brightness control is seamless and apps that support landscape orientation take advantage of the entire display — things just come alive!
Fire this thing up on your ultrabook at an airport and let the bystanders ween, “hey, this guy’s no mainstream.” Talk about gaming and you’ll be amazed to know that all (most) games work seamlessly as those Intel GPUs are definitely better than their tablet chipset counterparts for the most part. Wading through Temple Run or racing through the streets — it all makes sense on that huge 15.6" screens. Android gamers definitely stand to gain here, especially the ones who’re fond of strategy titles such as Clash of Clans and so on. Things are just more bigger and better.
Sounds convincing huh? (Smirks) — wait for it.
The Bads —Installation | GRUB
The installation factor kind of held me back at the beginning as it’s a wee more complex than you’d fathom, to get this thing running on your machine. Not as simple as firing up a setup.exe and tapping the next a couple of times until it says, “Bingo, setup complete. Tap here to run Android.” Only if it were that simple! I’d rate the difficulty level as semi-pro for someone who’s setup Ubuntu on his machine in the past. Off topic though, if you’ve ever setup Arch on your system in the past from scratch, this thing’s a cake walk for you pal, trust me. There are a couple of guides on the web that walk you through the steps though I didn’t find everything in one place and requires a bit of digging around especially for a few post-installation steps.
I’m keeping the language as non-technical as possible, though the handful of geeks reading this can note — the post-installation steps require you to install GRUB all by yourself and add the menu entry manually due to the faulty installers on all versions of Android x86 after g(old) Kitkat. This is insane if you’ve not got a flavor of Linux already installed on your machine! Nevertheless as a newbie to Linux, you’re definitely not doing this on your own unless you understand bootloaders, filesystems and formatting on a very basic note. That’s worth mentioning as everything on Linux installers is menu-based for the most part, duh.
The Bads — Audio
Now let’s talk about the more tangible stuff. One of the most common bugs faced is bad audio. This is mostly tied to the audio cards per se without Android x86 to blame. As such the optimization levels are terrible, which applies collectively to most Linux distros. Who’s to blame? — the kernel drivers for certain cards such as the one for the SoundBlaster on my rig which by default sets headphone out to mute. Headphones thus may not work on your machine.
The Bads — Power + Thermal Management
Another one being power management which has always been a losing battle for Linux. Lack of good thermal and power management can turn your Android x86 machine into a hotpot with about an hour of juice depending how healthy your battery is. My Alienware running Android x86, gives me less than 2h of screen-on with WiFi connected. (Psst. for you geeks — don’t trust Doze). That’s silly on a machine that gives me close to about 3.5–4h on a full charge with video playback and WiFi. Now here, Linux as a whole is to blame and not Android x86 alone as what’s below is essentially the Linux kernel.
Good thermal and power management comes with good drivers, the goodness which Linux infamously lacks. And if you by chance are running Android x86 on a quad core laptop with an HQ series processor or the like, note that it replicates as a cheaper alternative to an egg boiler.
The Bads — Lock Screen
We lock our Android phones to switch screens off, right? Doing it on your Android x86 machine is going to annoy you for what follows while resuming. Most laptop keyboards aren’t equipped with a dedicated context menu button which though, is found on most fully-blown desktop keyboards and sits right next to the space bar. For understanding purposes, this button works similar to the mouse right click when performed on the Windows desktop screen. Android x86’s official guide requires you to hold down a few buttons which includes the Esc, context menu and the arrow keys to resume from the locked screen. I, along with most of you out there, don’t have a context menu key on my keyboard — so what? No waking up. It’s the blessed sleep of death once locked. Consider doing an emergency restart if you accidentally lock your Android x86.
The Bads —Drivers
Chances are quite high that the WiFi, Bluetooth or for that matter even the display card on your machine may not work with Android x86. You can’t blame the community for that! Porting drivers is done for free and it requires quite a lot of knowledge to get these things running flawlessly. The Killer Networks WiFi card on my rig remained dysfunctional for over a year after which there was a fully-functional driver module released. Yet the ath10k driver that’s concerned with Bluetooth on my Alienware is still buggy at moment which leaves me with no Bluetooth. You’d face similar issues if your hardware is not (yet) supported. It’s a matter of time and time heals (theory of life).
Conclusion
Don’t count the headers as you’d possibly find the bads taking lead. Nevertheless, this article isn’t luring you out of Android x86 as it’s all about your perspective, what you want at the end of the day and what floats your boat! Despite all the odds, I’m definitely enjoying my time typing this article out on the official Medium app for Android on my Alienware 15 running Android 7.1. Thanks for reading!
