If you’ve got a Samsung Vibrant and want to take advantage of that unlimted 3G account you can tether without rooting the phone. This method uses a USB cable to provide internet access to Windows XP and Windows 7 computers. Samsung’s own Kies software handles the tethering, as long as you have the magic number to get connected on T-Mobile USA networks; ‘epc.tmobile.com’ for the APN name and ‘*99#’ as the phone number. [Zedomax] made the video after the break which takes you through the tethering ritual.

[Photo credit: Tnkgrl]

In the last few days, rooting the T-Mobile G1 and myTouch 3G has become much easier. [Zinx] released FlashRec which lets you flash a new recovery image onto your Android phone. It takes advantage of Linux kernel vulnerability CVE-2009-2692. The app lets you backup your current image and then flashes Cyanogen’s Recovery Image 1.4. Once that’s done, you can use any custom Android build you want. Android and Me has documented the entire process on their site and points out the ridiculously large number of custom ROMs that are out there. Embedded below is a video from [unknownkwita] showing the rooting process.

The iPhone dev-team has released Ultrasn0w to SIM unlock the iPhone 3G running the 3.0 firmware. It’s available via Cydia, which installs when you use the recently released PwnageTool to unlock the 3.0 firmware. There doesn’t seem to be any caveats besides advising T-Mobile US users to turn off 3G before install.

For those wanting to do some hacking  or kernel debugging on their G1, [macpoddotnet] shows how to make a serial to USB cable. He gathered enough information on the Android platform google group to be able to piece something together. He’s using a USB 2.8V serial TTL level converter, and lists several available that should work. Looks like a pretty easy build.

AndroidAndMe is running a bounty program for Android applications. Users can request a specific application and pledge money to be awarded to the developer who delivers the functional app. [Alec Holmes] just fulfilled the first request by creating Torrent Droid. You can use the app to scan media barcodes and then download the related torrent. It uses the phone’s camera to capture the product’s UPC barcode (similar to Compare Everywhere‘s price lookup) and then searches major torrent sites like The Pirate Bay to find a copy that can be downloaded. After getting the .torrent file, the app can submit it to uTorrent‘s web interface for remote downloading. The app will be released later this month and you can see a screenshot tour of it on Alec’s blog. It’s doubtful that an application like this would ever clear Apple’s App Store approval process.

[via TorrentFreak]

When we first saw [Jeffrey Nelson]‘s G1 based robot we immediately wondered what the transport for the controls was. The G1‘s hardware supports USB On-The-Go, but it’s not implemented in Android yet. It turns out he’s actually sending commands by using DTMF tones through the headphone adapter. The audio jack is connected to a DTMF decoder that sends signals to the bot’s Arduino. He wrote client/server code in Java to issue commands to the robot. You can find that code plus a simple schematic on his site. A video of the bot is embedded below.

[via Engadget]

[ghostwalker] dropped in on our previous Debian Android post to let us know that he had streamlined the install process. The first time around, it quickly became difficult to complete the process because firmware updates had taken away root access. Hackers have since figured out how to downgrade from RC30 and install BusyBox. All you need to do to put Debian on your phone is download the package from [ghostwalker] and then run the installer script. This isn’t technically a port since Debian already has ARM EABI support. What would you run on your phone if you had access to the entire Debian package tree? A video of Debian starting up is embedded below.

[photo: tnkgrl]

It’s the season of gift giving. Did you get anything interesting/hackable? What will you work on next?

We gave ourselves an Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1). We hadn’t really considered getting a G1 until the ADP1 was announced… It’s actually a lot of fun to use as our primary phone. Our favorite app so far is connectbot, the SSH client. The interface is really smart, way better than all of the iPhone clients.

What did you get?

To appease people waiting for the iPhone 3G unlock, iphone-dev team member [MuscleNerd] did a live video demo this afternoon. The video shows him removing the AT&T SIM and putting in a T-Mobile SIM. After the switch, the phone shows no connectivity. He then runs “yellosn0w” in an SSH session with the phone. The phone then unlocks without needing to be rebooted and the signal bars appear. The final test shows the phone receiving a call.

The target for this release is New Year’s Eve and it doesn’t support the most recent baseband. Well be attending the 25C3 talk hosted by [MuscleNerd] and other team members. The VNC screen you see in the video is thanks to [saurik]‘s Veency.

In our Dev Phone 1 excitement last week, we somehow overlooked phoneWreck’s teardown of the T-Mobile G1. The complex slider mechanism is certainly worth looking out. One of the major oddities they point out is the inclusion of two vibration motors. One is mounted next to the SIM on the mainboard. While the other is mounted in the frame next to the earpiece. We wonder what was gained/solved by using two. The phone also includes a digital compass module. We’d like a more detailed explanation of how the Xilinx CPLD is used. From this article in 2006, it seems HTC uses them to generate custom clock signals and switching off devices for power management.

While working towards open-sourcing Android, the team continued to work on new features in their own private development branch. These have now been published publicly in the “cupcake” branch. There’s a lot of interesting new features and bug fixes included. We’ve got a rundown of many of the significant additions after the break.

The A2DP and AVRCP profiles were both added to the Bluetooth stack. This means support for stereo headsets and remote control. Dial Up Networking wasn’t added, but preliminary work was done on USB Gadget Framework support, which means future devices could appear to the host device as just an ethernet interface.

The browser has been bumped up to the November release of WebKit with the optimized JavaScript engine SquirrelFish. Copy/paste in browser and a 5x draw speed improvement were also added. The trackball now does accelerated scrolling.

Hardware accelerated video recording and playback, an often noted oversight in the initial T-Mobile G1 release, finally show up. A framework for an on-screen keyboard and predictive text are being worked on. Android lets you run background processes and users will be pleased to know there’s a process manager now. Finally, a new Linux 2.6.27 kernel and the least explained addition “basic x86 support” round out the branch.

While there are many good improvements here, there is no indication as to when G1 users will see them or when Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1) owners will be able to build the release themselves. [Disconnect] points out that there were some other gems included in the branch that aren’t in the announcement like mounting an encrypted e2fs volume which could enable installing apps on the SD card.

[photo: tnkgrl]

[via GotOnTheInter.Net]

Google has new program to sell Android phones directly to developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 is both SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. SIM-unlocked means you can use it on any GSM carrier you want. Hardware-unlocked means you can run any system you want on the phone, not just officially signed ones. No more need to worry about security patches taking away your root access.

The device is $399. You will need to purchase it through the Android Market as a registered developer (a $25 fee). We wonder how long before the unsigned bootloader starts getting flashed to T-Mobile phones.

Two new Android phones have surfaced recently which may prove just as friendly: the Kogan Agora Pro and the QiGi i6.

UPDATE: While shipping is free in US, it is incredibly expensive everywhere else. Yes, we bought one.

[via Techmeme]

[photo: tnkgrl]

Google has been trickling out info about what they’re actually fixing in the G1 firmware updates. Before RC29, users were able to bypass the phone lock using safe mode. RC29 also brought WebKit up to date, presumably patching the bug [Charlie Miller] found. RC30 takes care of root console problem. Unfortunately there are very few details as to what or how particular items were broken. This release method leaves much to be desired; having the official Android Security Announcements group be the absolute last place to get security news is asinine.

[photo: tnkgrl]

[Jay Freeman] has a rather exhaustive tutorial on how to set up a Debian environment on your T-Mobile G1. The first major issue with this is that getting root level access through telnetd is being patched. It certainly is a security issue that needs to be fixed, but a user shouldn’t have to root their own phone to begin with. While the G1 comes with some Linux tools, they’re limited. [Jay]‘s goal was to create a familiar Debian environment on the phone. It takes a few tricks, but if you’re familiar with the command line, you shouldn’t have any problems. Debian already has ARM EABI support, so creating a working image isn’t a problem. The image file is stored on the SD card and mounted using the loopback device. The G1′s kernel has module support turned on, so [Jay] created an ext2 and unionfs kernel modules. [Benno Leslie]‘s Android version of busybox is used to perform the actual mounting. Once mounted, you just need to chroot into the environment to start playing with native Linux apps. [Jay] takes this a step further by using unionfs to make the Android and Debian environments share the same root. This is really a great how-to and it’s nice to know that modules can be added to the kernel.

[photo: tnkgrl]

[via Hackszine]

The G1 ‘execute every command you type‘ bug naturally spawned ‘rm -rf /’ jokes. rm is the Linux command for deleting files. The -r and -f flags will cause it to remove files recursively and ignore confirmation. Executed as root it will annihilate the entire filesystem. Won’t it? [Jon Hohle] decided to test exactly how destructive the command was to *nix systems. How functional would the system be afterwards? He tested it side by side with the Windows equivalent, both ‘format c:’ and ‘del /F /S /Q’. He wanted to see what protections were available and what would be left working. Linux ended up completely broken while Windows, thanks to file locking, actually shutdown cleanly… and never came back. Some OSes, like Solaris, refuse to run the command ‘rm -rf /’ to prevent accidents.