"One Device to rule them all, One Device to find them, One Device to bring them all and finally unconfine them"

Ok so I may have taken a few liberties there, but that's what we all want, right? One device that can do everything that we require of a computer throughout our daily lives. Smartphone by day, desktop by night.

Fortunately, we aren't the only ones who think that this is a great idea; the Ubuntu team has already announced plans to transform your smartphone into a proper computer when it's placed in a docking station, and with the release of Linux 3.3, this just got easier for OEMs to do as well.

Up until now, the Android project has been kept completely separate from the Linux kernel because developers from both projects couldn't agree on how they should be merged. This is now a thing of the past, and the latest update to the kernel has started the merging process between Android and Linux. Kernel Newbies has commented on the release, saying that

Various Android subsystems and features have already been merged, and more will follow in the future. This will make things easier for everybody, including the Android mod community, or Linux distributions that want to support Android programs.

We may not see a significant impact from this change immediately, but it means that over the coming months and years, it will be much easier for Linux developers to support Android programs and vice-versa.

With both camps set to benefit from the merging it will hopefully go ahead at full speed in future releases, and you never know, we might all be using crossover Android / Linux devices sooner than we think!

Source: Kernel Newbies