If you’ve been holding off on a T-Mobile G1 purchase because you didn’t like the apparent user restrictions, there’s some good news. The Android powered phone comes with an easy button for getting root. Install a terminal app and you can manually start the telnetd service. All that’s left is telenetting into the device and it’ll give you root level access.
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T-Mobile’s G1 was released last week and there has been at least one Android vulnerability announced already. The New York Times reported on research done by [Charlie Miller], who also helped find one of the first iPhone bugs, so we think the report is fairly credible. Last year, we saw him deliver a seminar on real world fuzzing at ToorCon 9. It covered exactly how they found the iPhone bug.
If you just want to use a G1 without service, you can activate it with any T-Mobile SIM card.
Above is Boing Boing Gadgets’ concise video review of Griffin AirCurve. It’s garbage. We first talked about it in our loaded horn post because it looked like something fun to redesign.
The iphone-dev team published a video today showing access to the iPhone’s baseband processor. They connect to the device over ssh and then use minicom to issue AT commands. They’re writing custom AT commands for full control.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y4thikv-OM&fmt=18]
Google has officially released the Android source code. While the T-Mobile G1 is being released tomorrow—some already have it—it is just one Android device. The availability of the source means that the platform could be port to almost any device. It’s a complete embedded Linux package and we’ve already seen it running on the N810. We can’t wait to see what hacks come out of this.
Our friend [Jeffrey Sharkey] hacked the iTunes remote control protocol and produced his own version for Android, one of the smartphone OSes we just covered. He pored over dumped packets for a few days and wrote a client which is of course GPL’d. Besides that, he’s been busy winning the Android Developer Challenge. His app, Compare Everywhere, was one of the top 10 winners, netting him a cool $275,000. This ingenious bit of code deciphers barcodes scanned using a cell phone camera and then finds prices for that item at every nearby store that sells it.
The other winners wrote apps that do cool things such as one-click cab ordering, locate missing children, and find parties. Check out all 50 finalists and winners here.
Gizmodo’s in-depth look at smartphone OSes provides you with the pros and cons of each, allowing you to make an educated decision, if you’re in the market for a phone that also has email, a web browser, a calendar, and a decent contacts manager. If you’re attracted to the open source Linux-based Android by Google, you’ll also have to keep in mind that there aren’t that many business features. Other contenders include the Blackberry by RIM, which is great for email, but is completely closed and proprietary. The Apple iPhone is very pretty but lacks some basic features. They cover Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm Garnet too. It’s certainly a handy guide since most people haven’t used all six.
Engadget has a full gallery of the new HTC Dream, the first production phone running Android. It will be available on T-Mobile some time this Fall (missing features notwithstanding).
Google has decided that its initial release of the Android SDK will not include formal Bluetooth support or Google Talk. Bluetooth headsets will still work, but developers will not have access to the Bluetooth portion of the API. Google’s security researchers have announced that Google Talk was left out because of multiple security concerns. Bluetooth, on the other hand, was left out because the development team ran out of time.
Out of these two features, we think users are going to be most disappointed by the omission of Google Talk. Chatting has become one of the most useful features of new smart phones. The ability to just chat instead of sending a text message is one of the main attractions to phones like the iPhone, which has support for AIM.
[photo: dreamside]
