Medium Roast

£130 from HMV for a 10.1″ wide-screen Android tablet to experiment with. Why not?

How to install the Archos SDE firmware. This process works for the 101 too.
www.arctablet.com – Installing Archos Special developer edition (SDE) firmware on an Archos 70 IT

Read the warnings about Archos Special Developer Edition as it’s a one-way, warranty-voiding process.

This provides access to The Ångström Distribution: www.angstrom-distribution.org.

I’ve now installed UrukDroid 1.5 on it. It’s most certainly faster to use although ArcTools is force closing on me so I don’t yet have Google Market access. Working on that now…

Update: UrukDroid 1.6RC2 is now installed and running well, much smoother than stock. ArcTools 0.56 just wouldn’t run so instead use 0.50 as per the instructions found here: www.arctablet.com – Arctools 0.56 won’t start

An updated Galaxo ROM (1.6.3.4) is available for Samsung Galaxy i7500 owners:
www.drakaz.com – galaxo 1.6.3.4

I’m not going to bother updating to this though as it seems GAOSP Beta 3 is going to be available very soon:
www.drakaz.com – gaosp2 nightly

The camera is now working and the light sensor is fixed. If you are going to use either of these ROMs, remember they use a new unified V6.1 Recovery.

A two day barcamp and conference exploring all aspects of developing for Android mobile devices. Thursday is the barcamp, Friday is the conference day with tracks covering Development, Business, Design and valuable SDKs & APIs.

Early bird tickets are now available: www.droidcon.co.uk

Moving from a 32-bit Windows XP laptop to a Windows 7 64-bit desktop I encountered a few problems with Eclipse IDE and Java.

For starters, Google suggest using Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) and NOT 3.6 (Helios).
“There are known issues with the ADT plugin running with Eclipse 3.6. Please stay on 3.5 until further notice.” developer.android.com – requirements

Also the 64-bit builds of Eclipse will only work with 64-bit Java VMs:
“This build requires a 64-bit JVM, and will not run with a 32-bit JVM. You can, for example, use the Sun 64-bit 1.5 JVM for AMD64. Note that the Sun 1.4.2 JVM for AMD64 is 32-bit and therefore cannot be used to run this build.”

Finally, the Eclipse 3.3 – 3.6 launchers for Windows have a problem with the Oracle/Sun Java VM version ‘1.6.0_21′. See bugs.eclipse.org for more details.

To fix, add the following line after “-vmargs” to your eclipse.ini:
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

So, in the end I decided it was easier to stick with 32-bit Eclipse 3.5, Java 1.6.0_21 and once I’d edited the eclipse.ini file (as above) everything seemed much more stable.

I look forward to being able to use 64-bit Eclipse 3.6 with a 64-bit JVM and not have the IDE hang or crash every 5 minutes.

If you do opt for the 64-bit Android development environment, there’s some instructions here to get it set up.

For full instructions on how to flash your own i7500, please read the Easy Guide to updating to Galaxo.

This step-by-step process worked flawlessly for me.

Google has announced a new software update for the Nexus One that finally enables multi-touch support in the web browser, photo gallery, and Google Maps apps. With the update, N1 users will be able to zoom in and out of pictures, web pages and Google Maps by pinching the screen.

The Nexus One update will also make Google Goggles a default app, allowing users to snap pictures of everyday objects and search the web using that image. It will also bring Google Maps up to version 3.4, which synchronizes starred items, offers search suggestions, and a new Night Mode for easy nighttime viewing. Thankfully, Google says the update will fix 3G connectivity issues.

Powered by Android OS 2.1, the Nexus One offers Android fans the most advanced Android features on market today – in fact, no other Android phone currently runs Android 2.1. And, with a feature-set that includes a 1Ghz processor, 3.7-inch capacitive OLED touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with flash, 3G, WiFi, and GPS packed into a body no thicker than a pencil, it’s clear that the Nexus One is one of this year’s hottest smartphones.

www.intomobile.com – Nexus One update enables multi-touch, unlocks iPhone-killing potential

Thanks again to the guys at HDBlog.it for making flashing Samsung Galaxy i7500 even easier with the new 4.4 recovery image.

I’ve just used this to successfully update another Galaxy device to the Galaxo ROM.

The new Recovery Image means you don’t have to flash to II5 (although I’d already done this) and you no longer backup the Google Apps before flashing the phone. They are restored using the II5.tar you copy to the internal SD (see original Galaxo update process here).

There’s an updated GalaxHero ROM here but I wanted to use the lighter/faster Galaxo ROM again.

Samsung I7500 mustymod ROM (Android 2.0), Android 2.0 (Eclair) for Samsung Galaxy

There’s still a lot of work to be done but this is certainly promising. If Samsung don’t release an update in Feb there are a number of other developers on the case.

Among the production Android devices presently languishing on pre-Donut are the Galaxy andGalaxy Spica from Samsung — both of which use essentially stock implementations of the platform, robbing Sammy of the code-porting excuse that HTC has been using with Sense. That might be close to changing, though, now that Samsung Firmware’s saying that the Spica (alias Galaxy Lite) is signed up for a 2.0 update in February and that they “think its [sic] also for the Galaxy.” Now, Samsung Firmware is far from an official Samsung source — but seeing how the site maintains a vice-like grip on every conceivable Samsung ROM the second it’s released, they’ve got some basis to be trusted on these matters. Of course, there’s also the circumstantial evidence that the company simply has no excuse whatsoever to sit on the update any longer than it already has — not to say that’s ever stopped a company before, sadly.

from: mobile.engadget.com

Based on a tweet from SamsungFirmware

This assumes you are running II5 firmware and know what adb is.

- Download ’signed-google_ion-ota-14721.zip’ (51.5MB) from developer.htc.com.

- Extract ‘libhgl.so’ from the /system/lib folder in the zip file.

- In a command prompt, run adb remount

- In a command prompt, run adb push [location of file] /system/lib/libhgl.so

Originally: www.android-hilfe.de