T-Mobile G1 Teardown

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

g1teardown

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.

Android Adds A2DP, AVRCP Bluetooth And More

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

tmobileg1

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.

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Hardware-unlocked Android G1 For Sale

December 8, 2008 by Eliot 14 Comments

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]

G1 Multitouch Proof Of Concept

November 23, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSBYqmWVqeM]

[RyeBrye] has been trying to get multitouch working on the Android based T-Mobile G1. He hacked the Synaptics touchscreen driver so that it would dump raw event info to a character device. The demo above is using example code from Google for a fingerpaint program. Polling the device is not the fastest method, but [RyeBrye] just wanted to get a demo out there to prove it could be done.

YouTube Testing Even Higher Quality Videos

November 21, 2008 by Eliot 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22]

YouTube, purveyor of some of worst looking flash video is finally getting their act together. We posted the other day about embedding videos using &fmt=18 to get higher quality YouTube videos. It seems the awesome knob has now been turned up to &fmt=22. All of the previous tricks should work, just use 22 instead of 18. This all depends on the highdef version being available. Now they just need to get rid of the grainy preview images.

Reversing Google’s IPhone Voice Search

November 18, 2008 by Eliot 4 Comments

Google recently updated their Google Mobile App with a couple new features. Voice Search automatically starts listening when you raise the phone to your ear. Just say what you’re looking for, and it will poll Google and return the results. The app leverages Google’s voice recognition engine, which they’ve been training with Goog-411. [Andy Baio] has been experimenting with audio transcription and was curious what the new app was doing behind the scenes. He started by sniffing the packets as they traversed his network. Unfortunately, the size of the data packets transmitted is so small that he’s almost certain he’s missing something. He’d appreciate any help in this endeavor. Part of the problem might be Google getting special treatment and using undocumented iPhone SDK features.

SketchUp Adds Dynamic Components

November 17, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aVW5X-tb8s]

Google just announced the release of SketchUp 7. SketchUp is a 3D modeling program with a fairly robust free version. They’ve added quite a few features and the one that caught our eye in particular was dynamic components. Dynamic components have behavior specific to the object. The example in the video above shows a staircase changing the number of steps as its height is increased instead of distorting the overall staircase shape. The new version also allows for interaction, so model properties change based on user actions.

Google has always encouraged sharing of objects created in SketchUp. Thingiverse launched today with a similar emphasis. The site is built to encourage the exchange of plans for physical objects. It supports many different file types from plain images, AutoCAD dxfs to Eagle schematics. Many of the designs already posted are made to be cut out by a laser cutter or built by a 3D printer.

[via Make]