Work in progress: ICS port being built for Nokia N9

Android developers are building an ICS port for Nokia’s N9 handset. Developer Alexey Roslyakov tweeted a picture of the smartphone running the Android port with the title ‘Progress’.

Released in the fall of 2011, the N9 was the first smartphone to run on MeeGo, the operating system created by Nokia and Intel. Tough it was not as well received as expected, probably due to the simultaneous launch of Windows Phone devices, the N9 has some great features on its hardware. It sports a 1GHz OMAP processor and offers 1GB of RAM. An ICS port is just what it needs to get back into the limelight.

The ICS port will bring all the best features of the sophisticated Android OS to the powerful N9. The manner in which the port is being developed will ensure that ICS runs along with MeeGo on the handset and doesn’t take away anything from the latter. This is great news for owners of the N9 who are used to the MeeGo OS and are vary of suddenly changing over.

From the picture tweeted by Roslyakov that Android Community got its hands on, it looks like the progress on the port is slow but steady. The N9 in the image shows off an over lapping lock screen, home screen and Android widgets. The software is supposedly running on a dual-boot configuration so as not to affect the working of the MeeGo OS.

The hardware of the N9 is good enough to support Android 4.0 and the effort to build an ICS port for the phone is commendable. It will be interesting to see how well the handset does if the ICS port is indeed completed.