I've been waiting for this to happen. Some intrepid tinkerers have figured out how to port the Android operating system to smartphone hardware other than the officially sanctioned HTC G1. The HTC Touch, it turns out, runs Android quite well. How long before Android goes all-out and starts to assimilate other handsets?The real beauty of Android is that it can be downloaded and used by anyone for free. Granted, if you want to actually use the platform, you need some hardware on which to run it. Right now, the HTC G1 is the only official handset running the Android platform. That hasn't stopped hackers from figuring out how to replace the pre-loaded operating system on their smartphones with Android.

The HTC Touch happens to be a very capable Android handset, as some hackers have figured out. The Touch is a Windows Mobile smartphone. It doesn't have the hardware keyboard that the G1 does, but you'll see in the video below that Android looks quite good. They show us how well Street Views works, how well search works (check out the software QWERTY!), and the browser. Very neat stuff!

I wish I had a touch-screen WinMo phone to test this out on, but alas, my WinMo phones are all running the Standard version of 6.1. Right now, this hack (provided by the XDA Developers) only works on the HTC Touch, due to its processor. I hope to see Android ported to other hardware in the not-too-distance future.