Thursday, April 10, 2014

4 Ways to Run Android on Your PC and Make Your Own “Dual OS” System


Intel is now interested in pushing “Dual OS” PCs — devices with both Windows 8 and Android on them. But you don’t have to buy a new PC to do this — you can run Android apps and even the Android operating system on your current PC.

This allows you to use Android’s ecosystem of touch-based apps on touch-enabled Windows laptops and tablets, so it does make some sense. Of course, the process is clunker than just using Windows 8 apps.

BlueStacks
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BlueStacks is currently the best way to run Android apps on Windows. It doesn’t replace your entire operating system. Instead, it runs Android apps within a window on your Windows desktop. This allows you to use Android apps just like any other program. BlueStacks also includes support for easy installation of apps from Google Play, so the process is as seamless as possible. Even better, BlueStacks runs Android apps and games with surprisingly good performance.

This solution can’t replace Windows with Android, but that’s not a bad thing — competing solutions that allow you to dual boot Android with Windows are currently unstable. This is only a solution for running Android apps on Windows.  Unlike many of the other options here, this is a fairly stable and polished experience.

Similar applications, including YouWave and Windroy, lack the speed and easy app installation BlueStacks offers.

Official Android Emulator
Google provides an official Android emulator as part of the Android SDK. You can use it to run the Android operating system in a window on your existing computer. This gives you complete access to the entire Android operating system. It’s intended for developers to test their Android apps.

Unfortunately, the official Android emulator is rather slow and isn’t a good option for everyday use. It’s useful if you want to test apps or play with the latest version of Android, but you wouldn’t want to actually use apps or play games in it.

To get started with the Android Emulator, download Google’s Android SDK, open the SDK Manager program, and select Tools > Manage AVDs. Click the New button and create a an Android Virtual Device (AVD) with your desired configuration, then select it and click the Start button to launch it.

android-sdk-android-emulator

Android-x86
Android-x86 is a community project to port Android to the x86 platform so it can run natively on Intel and AMD processors, allowing you to install Android on a laptop or tablet just as you’d install Windows or Linux. This project was originally noteworthy for providing a way to run Android on low-power netbooks, giving those old netbooks some additional life.

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