Summary

While it still appears to be a somewhat immature technology in Honeycomb, RenderScript is already improving in Android 4.0 and is going to take advantage of more hardware features in the future. Even though ARM is clearly the dominant architecture in Android portable devices nowadays and using the NDK can therefore be justified, the fact that RenderScript is platform-independent can be a huge benefit as it can ultimately reduce your maintenance cost significantly. All in all, RenderScript shows some promises and is likely to be an important part of your applications in the future should you need to reach performance levels not attainable with Java alone.