Tethering The Samsung Vibrant Without Rooting

July 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

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.

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1-Click Android Rooting

August 17, 2009 by Eliot 19 Comments

rooting

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.

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IPhone 3G Ultrasn0w Unlock Released

June 23, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

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.

Serial To USB Cable For The G1

March 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

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.

Android App Scans Barcodes, Downloads Torrents

March 11, 2009 by Eliot 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h05KrEjHW6g]

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]

Forknife, Android G1 Controlled Robot

January 25, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

g1bot

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.

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Debian On The G1 Once Again

January 15, 2009 by Eliot 7 Comments

[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.

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