AMD deal brings Android apps to Windows 8


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AMD deal brings Android apps to Windows 8

Some Windows 8 laptops and PCs could end up running more Android apps than ones written for Microsoft's software.

Gadgets built around chips made by AMD will come optimised to run the Android apps.

A collaboration between AMD and software firm Bluestacks lets the devices run the 500,000 apps more usually found on Android phones.

By contrast, Microsoft reportedly only has a few thousand apps written specifically for Windows 8 at launch.

The Android apps will be available on Windows 8 devices via AMD's AppZone player. Inside this is code from Bluestacks that acts as a wrapper around the mobile phone programs so they can run on desktops, laptops and tablets.

AMD has made changes to the core code that runs its processors and graphics cards to ensure apps built for the small screens on mobile phones look good and run well on larger displays.

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BlueStacks has been around for a few months... This article makes it seem like it's only just arrived with AMD's help; that's untrue.

See the quote from Wiki:

The company raised $7.6 million in Series A funding in May, 2011 from Andreessen-Horowitz, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Ignition Partners and RedPoint Ventures.[8] On Oct. 20, 2011 it was announced that the company had raised another $6.4 million in Series B financing[9] from the same group of investors, as well as the chip-maker AMD.
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This will be good for me, as I find lots of android media players that are better then the RT ones on windows 8. I get an android tablet and a windows tablet in one device that is nice.

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Android apps are generally poor quality so I'm not sure why you'd want to run them on Windows. AMD will have to do a lot more than this to stay in the game.

Not even close. The apps that I use daily on my Android stuff are far from what I'd consider "poor quality"

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Has anyone actually tried and successfully installed this? I tried it sandboxed and it quits then tried it on a VM but it keeps on restarting the download process.

I played with BlueStacks extensively for a little while back in Oct/Nov. I was able to get so far as to root it and install the Google framework. It had it's issues due to it's young age, but I still had a bit of fun with it. It has fantastic potential, especially when rooted and spoofed to run like an actual Android device.

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Android apps are generally poor quality so I'm not sure why you'd want to run them on Windows. AMD will have to do a lot more than this to stay in the game.

I agree, on a whole Android apps are poorly written (particularly when compared to their iOS counterparts), there are a handful of very high quality Android apps but they are vastly outnumbered by rubbish ones, which is a shame. If more developers put as much effort into their Android apps as they do their iOS ones, it would help shake this perception of Android being a bad platform in my humble opinion...

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Intel brings us the Ultrabook and amd brings unoptimized android apps, no wonder they're in trouble. I can see it now, spending hundreds on a W8 device only to run android on it, makes perfect sense. :wacko:

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Intel brings us the Ultrabook and amd brings unoptimized android apps, no wonder they're in trouble. I can see it now, spending hundreds on a W8 device only to run android on it, makes perfect sense. :wacko:

Clearly you're missing the point. If you're buying a Windows 8 device JUST to run Android apps, you're foolish. The point is you're getting 2 worlds in one. I don't know about you, but I actually like getting my money's worth when purchasing electronics. This is definitely not a negative.

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