Much Ado About Android – part II

Before we start talking about hacking your Android phone and doing neat little things to it, we need to go over all of the bits and pieces that are needed. Now this series of posts is not designed to be a complete step by step for every Android device out there. It is however, designed to be a complete walk through of what I did to hack my HTC Magic. My hope is that this will give you the foundation from which you can gather the right information for your device. As we all know, trying to piece this information together from Internet forums can be painful. NOTE: You need to be really careful when modifying embedded devices like a phone. If you do things wrong, in the wrong order, or if you do not have enough patience you can brick your device. Bricking your device means that you have turned it in to a very expensive paper weight and that it is dead and unusable as an electronic device. Make sure you spend some time doing your research into issues that people are having with your specific phone and do not assume that just because it is an HTC Magic like mine that it is exactly the same as mine. Internal motherboards, chips, radios, etc can be different and you need to gather all of that information. Further, you do this at your own risk and your millage may very. I am not responsible in anyway for anything that you do or do not do with the information found in these posts. If you brick your phone, I am sorry, but it is not my fault.

Step 1 - The first thing that you are going to need to do is download and install the Android SDK (Software Developer Kit) for your OS. I will be doing all of my examples from Linux, but tutorials are out there for Windows and MAC. You can download the SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. Follow the install guide to get this setup. I installed mine at /local/android-sdk/

Step 2 - If you have an HTC device you will need to download the fastboot tool from the HTC developer site. This download can be found at: http://developer.htc.com/adp.html. Unzip this file to the /local/android-sdk/tools/ directory. You will need to “chmod 755 fastboot” to make it executable too. If HTC did not make your device, then you will need to find something similar from the vendor that made your phone.

Step 3 - Enable the “USB Debugging” feature on your device. You can do this by pressing: The MENU key -> Settings -> Applications -> Development and then enabling USB debugging. This is important as we want to tell the phone that we are going to be doing development on it and to expect commands to be delivered to the phone over the USB connection.

Step 4 - We need to tell our Linux USB stack how to deal with the HTC phone so that we can talk to it via the Android SDK and HTC fastboot tools. You can see documentation for this at: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html. For Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 you can do this by creating the following file: /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules and adding the following to it:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

Step 5 – Gather build information about your phone. You can get this information by pressing: The MENU key -> Settings -> About phone. This information will help you when you need to go look for specific details about your device. My HTC Magic had the following from the factory.
HTC Magic
Firmware version: 1.5
Baseband version: 62.52S.20.18U_3.22.20.17
Kernel version: 2.6.27-357975db herbert@and18-2 #1069
Build number: 2.16.707.3 146733 CL#32934 release-keys

In my next post I will talk about ROMs, the various boot loaders and how to get more details about your phone, the type of motherboard it has, what kind of radio firmware is loaded, what kind of bootloader it has, etc. We will also get a recovery ROM loaded and installed.

Much Ado About Android – part I

After years of dealing with completely frustrating and useless Windows mobile cellular devices I decide it was time to jump on the inevitable bandwagon of Google and their Android platform. The reason I choose Android over the iPhone is I like the idea of a little more freedom and while I do not agree with all of Google’s business practices, I appreciate that their prison is little more accommodating. Now, every technology platform is its own little prison, regardless of what people will even say about Linux or FreeBSD.

When it comes to vendors, hands down, Apple makes the nicest and most comfortable prisons. Microsoft makes functional prisons that appear to work seamlessly so long as you can tolerate all of the constant maintenance, damp infected rooms, and doors that should lead to bliss but only lead to dead ends. The Google prison is very similar to Apple’s but not quite as refined or clean. The trade off is that Google lets you out of your cell from time to time and even lets you share food and toys with your neighbors. And if you are adventurous enough and willing to go through all the hoops you can even leave the prison for short periods of time to go get your own soda and desert. All in all Apple and Google make very similar and wonderful prisons, but I choose Google Android.

Before I get carried away and you all think I am hook-line-and-sinker in love with Google; Google is evil and stores and tracks way too much information about what we do, what we like, and how we use our computers and the Internet. The reason I am okay with Google compared to the tactics that Microsoft employs is that Google does not force their technology down our throats. Now if Google decided that you could only use their search engine from certain computers, of that you could only access GMail through Chrome, or if they created their own language that you were forced to use to access any of your data stored on their cloud, I would definitely lump them in to the Microsoft camp and boycott them. But I digress; this post is not about my views of why and how Microsoft failed when they could have so easily taken over the world.

The phone I purchased was an unlocked version of the HTC Magic (same as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, just an unlocked version). This phone shipped with version 1.5 of the Android OS commonly referred to by its code name of Cupcake (Version 1.6 has a code name of Donut for example, 2.0/2.1 is called Eclair, and 2.2 is called Froyo). Now as you can see, version 1.5 is really starting show its age. Eclair is out and Froyo is quickly on its way. So I decided I was going to take Google’s pledge to the test and try and take my phone out for a walk and see about updating its code.

So following all the buzz about newer features and the beauty of the Android platform I spent the better part of the weekend reading and reading and reading about all the bits and pieces that are needed to get your phone “hacked”, “rooted”, and upgraded. Now I must say that there is a LOT of information out there about how to do this and do that, and the folks over at http://forum.xda-developers.com and http://androidcommunity.com have a plethora of information. However, like all things Linux it is a PAIN-IN-THE-BACKSIDE to try and piece it all together. Linux people and developers are often of the mindset that it is it out there somewhere in some nasty forum list somewhere and that you need to read every meaningless post for hours and hours to find the one nugget of information that you need.

Over the next few days/weeks I am going to write a series of short posts that talk about the various bits and pieces and how they all bolt together so that you do not need to spend hours trying figure out what is what.