Most of the smart phones we cover on this blog tend to have the same the same look and feel as the originals that inspire them, but they also tend to revert to the tried and trusted MTK software stack for it their OS needs. This was the case yesterday when we looked at the latest Blackberry clone. It was Blackberry on the outside but not on the inside, and this is understandably so; the Blackberry OS is a proprietary piece of software that will remain exclusive to Blackberry and forever out of reach for the shanhzai.

This is not the case here with the Hero clone which is of course loaded with Google's Android platform. Android is based on the Linux kernel and is developed by the Open Handset Alliance and licensed under the Open Source GPL v2 license. While this means it's free for shanzhai manufacturers to use it's actually not as easy to deploy as you might first expect. Android is designed to work on the ARM processors that power our cell phones, but there are many other pieces to the puzzle that are needed to make it work. In fact it takes a great deal of customization within the OS to get it implemented on any given ARM SOC, indeed these SOCs or System on Chips are seldom ever the same.

I'm assuming then that the TigerG3 and its Google Android OS is either the product of some really hard work to implement Android, or it uses the exact same processor platform that the original HTC Hero does. My money is on the latter scenario. But hey, if you have any insight, please chip in with a comment.

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