I bought a Sony Google TV today, hoping to get a jump-start on readying Better Terminal Emulator Pro for Google TV (by hacking it.) After not being able to ADB into the Google TV via Ethernet, I decided to take screwdriver to it and find out if there are any debug ports inside…

Google TV Teardown

For the first three weeks of September, Better Terminal Emulator Pro for Android purchasers have raised 629.08 for the Danny Cox Rehabilitation Fund (www.dannycox707.com). There is only a little more than one week left in September, and I was hoping to break $1000, so please keep the purchases coming. Danny can really use the money since his family’s out of pocket medical expenses are projected to exceed $100,000.00.

Thanks to everyone who has purchased Better Terminal Emulator Pro to help out Danny.

For the month of September 2010, I will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of “Better Terminal Emulator Pro” to the Danny Cox Rehabilitation Fund. I do not know Danny personally, but I heard about his accident on the local news last night and want to do something to help. So if you are using a pirated version of BTEP, now is the time to get legit and help out a good cause. At the end of every week during the month of September, I will post the results and make the dontation, so we can track the progress, and so Danny can get the help he needs.

I ordered my Motorola Droid X online last week, and was thrilled to find that it shipped out on Friday despite being sold out across the US. On Monday, I received the Droid X along with car dock and desk dock. I had some problems activating the phone, and called Verizon. They attempted to lead me through a manual activation process, and during the course of that, I found that the touch screen had a mind of its own. It was pressing on-screen buttons and typing on the on-screen keyboard all by itself. Even if I put the phone down on a table, this behavior continued. I tried connecting it to the charger, disconnecting it from the charger, several reboots, pulling the battery, factory reset, etc, all to no avail. After about 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon, they transferred me to tech support, and agreed to send me a new phone. Unfortunately, I don’t think I will be seeing it any time soon since it is sold out. Verizon customer support and tech support was extremely courteous and helpful, and I couldn’t have asked for better service. They even helped me re-activate my old Droid as an interim solution until the replacement Droid X arrives.

Yesterday, I was able to coax the hobbled Droid X onto WiFi, and download the OTA update. I had hopes that this would “fix” the touch screen issue, but unfortunately it did not.

The Droid X seems like a cool phone, and probably my best choice for a phone with 4.3″ screen on Verizon since Verizon will not accept the EVO 4G phone on their network. I can’t wait for the new Droid X to arrive, and I hope the touchscreen issue is not widespread.

The Sprint HTC EVO 4G is a great phone, but it comes with a bunch of crapware apps pre-installed. These can normally not be removed. But with a rooted and NAND-unlocked EVO 4G, the following guide will show you how to remove these apps. Enjoy.

Now that the HTC Incredible has been rooted, and the kernel source released by HTC, it is possible to make changes to the BCM4329 WiFi driver to support 802.11n. The modification is trivial, but getting the new driver installed on the phone is a bit more challenging since the HTC Incredible NAND FLASH is locked (ie, you can’t write to /system/ unless you are in Recovery Mode.) Hopefully this limitation will be removed soon.

In this writeup, I will illustrate how to modify and compile the driver, and how to copy it onto your phone. Obviously, this is for seasoned Android devs, and not for the casual user. Since your phone needs to be rooted before doing this procedure, you will have to void your phone’s warranty, but since you are a dev, you have probably done this already… PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Visit the MagicAndroidApps Wiki to see how to enable 802.11n.

Today I rooted my HTC Incredible at long last. Thanks to the the Unrevoked RootWiki. I tried this on my HTC Incredible (using Linux) and it mostly worked. I had trouble installing the Superuser Whitelist app, and the su utility was returning “Permission Denied.” The way I got around this was to replace the ‘su’ utility on the phone with my own. You can download the modified ‘su’ utility here. You must “chmod 6755 /system/bin/su” for this to work. I don’t know why Superuser Whitelist would not install, but this works around it.

Now I can run Better Terminal Emulator Pro on my HTC Incredible as root. Thanks to the hackers over at Unrevoked for this great work.

Finally, you can get root access on the HTC EVO 4G. See this thread on xda-developers.com. I tried this on the EVO 4G I received at Google I/O. One thing I initially had problems with was the bootloader did not recognize the PC36IMG.zip that I copied to my SD Card. I was using the 2GB SD Card that Google gave out at I/O along with the EVO 4G. Reformatting the card as FAT32 using Windows, and then copying PC32IMG.zip fixed the problem.

Another thing I did was rename /system/etc/security/otacerts.zip while in recovery mode so that Sprint will not be able to OTA update my phone to the recently released update that blocks root access.

Now I can use Better Terminal Emulator Pro as root on my EVO 4G!

I didn’t try the Froyo Update for the 4G yet, but may do so after I have some fun with the stock rooted ROM.

Hopefully someone will figure out how to root the Droid Incredible (for real) soon, as I really like the Incredible otherwise…

Today Google announced several notable statistics at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco:

* 50,000 Apps in Market
* 100,000 new Android phone activations per day.
* 180,000 Android Developers
* Over 1 Billion Maps Navigation miles navigated in six months.

Froyo (Android 2.2)
* 20 New Features
* New Data Backup API
* Cloud to device messaging API: notifications
* Tethering and Portable Hotspot (WiFi and USB)
* (Demo of Wifi Hotspot) tethering to iPad (example device without connectivity)

Browser
* Browser: Froyo has major Browser improvements: 2-3x performance improvement in Browser (V8 ported from Chrome Browser)
* Demo with Froyo, Eclair and iPad: Froyo beats iPad easily, but not Eclair.
* Froyo == Fastest mobile browser.
* HTML5 and Beyond: access to hardware features like accelerometer, camera, etc. from Browser.

Voice Recognition:
* Google made a deep investment in voice recognition a couple years ago.
* Demo of several voice searches.
* Call 5th floor restaurant: automatically makes a voice call.
* Demo several web apps that access voice recognition features: Translate English sentence to French.

Flash Player 10 Public Beta
* It turns out that on the internet, people use Flash.
* Demo Nickalodeon on iPad vs. Nexus One. iPad just shows a blank orange screen.

Market
* Find apps more easily.
* Search within data of apps.
* Apps to SD card!!!!
* Move to SD card in a secure way.
* Apps automatically move to the correct place.
* Can be moved manually if desired.
* Demo of “Need for Speed”
* Auto update/update all.
* Automatic updating without user intervention if desired.

Application Error Reports
* Added “Report” in addition to “Force Close”
* Shows entire stacktrace in developer console.

Sneak Peek of What’s Next for Market (after Froyo)
* Android Marketplace accessible from Browser on a PC.
* Can download apps from PC and have them appear on phone via the cloud.
* Can send music directly to the phone via the Internet (no iTunes needed!)

Google recently required “Simplified Media” to make your entire media library available as a stream.

Advertising
* Advertising extended to Mobile.
* Google Ad Program (Adsense for Mobile Ads [AFMA])
* Cllick to call option, rich media in app ads, expandable ad format.
* google.com/mobileads
* Opening up AFMA for all conference attendees, $100 credit!

Sprint HTC EVO 4G
* Google is giving all conference attendees an EVO 4G TODAY!!!!!!

Google TV (it just keeps getting better!)
* A new platform that will change the future of Television.
* Americans spend 5 hours a day on average.
* $70 Billion dollars in Ad spending on TV per year.
* Four billion TV users worldwide.

Google TV: TV MEETS WEB. WEB MEETS TV.

* Less time finding, more time watching.
* Control and personalize what you watch.
* More than just a TV.

(Some technical difficulties…)

* Search TV listings and DVR.

(More technical difficulties)
(Asking people to turn off phones….)

Demo is now working.

* Gone from 200 channels to a million channels overnight, through the quick search box.

* Works with existing cable/set top box.

Hardware Requirements:
* Broadband connectivity (WLAN and Ethernet)
* HDMI
* IR Blaster (to control your set top box)
* Fast Processor

Using Android Phone as a remote paired to TV over WiFi. Demo gets ooh’s and aah’s and clapping. Voice search on phone to find “Good Morning America” on Google TV. (It worked.)

Google going to publish the IP Remove Control protocol.

Google TV – Software
* Built on Android 2.1, can do OTA updates to newer versions of Android.
* Browser is Google Chrome
* Full Flash 10.1 Plugin
* Deliver Web Apps and Android Apps

Android apps that do not use specialized hardware (ie, accelerometer) can work on Google TV.

Developer Involvement for Google TV
* APIs for Google TV will be available shortly after launch.

YouTube “Lean Back”
* Will be announced in Beta in a couple weeks.

NBA + Google TV
* nba.com
* Google TV – DVR Integration (uses IR Blaster to program set top box.)

Android Apps for Google TV
* Google Listen – Now has video capability.
* Can do translation of subtitles into various languages!

Sign up on www.google.com/tv

Google TV will be open source on both Android and Chrome repositories.

Google TV – Coming to Market
* Sony: integrated TVs and DVD Player.
* Logitech: stand-alone player and accessories.
* CPU: Intel Atom
* Dish Network
* Best Buy

Coming to market Fall 2010!

Timeline for Developers:
* Early 2011 adds Android Market over OTA update.
* SDK will be available around then.
* Will be open-sourced by Summer 2011.

Eric Schmidt: CEO of Google
* Talking about Google TV.
* Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel
* CEO of Sony, Logitech, Dish Network, Best Buy all come on stage.
* And, the CEO of Adobe

Paul talks about the specialized Atom CPU in Google TV:
* Atom CPU + Special peripherals for TV: GPU, etc.

CEO of Adobe:
* Flash 10.1 (Public Beta on Android.) – Battery Life, performance, HD video, gaming.

CEO of Sony:
* World’s first Internet Television
* “When we launch it in the Fall” – direct quote from CEO of Sony.

CEO of Logitech:
* “Harmony” line of remote controls.
* Biggest opportunity in the living room are combination of TV and Web.
* Logitech will ship in Fall.

CEO of Dish Network
* Know consumers want to combine TV and Web.
* Started with Web TV (Microsoft) but it was ahead of its time (dialup-based.)

CEO of Best Buy:
* Google TV is in a new category “Smart TV.”
* “Addresses how consumers now in an ad-hoc method are enjoying and consuming media.”

*Note* This blog entry was created using Android-x86 2.1 (Eclair) for the Dell Mini, connected via WiFi at Google I/O…

Android-x86 r2.1 (Eclair) is now available for the Dell Mini 9, 10, and 10V.

See the MagicandroidApps Wiki for instructions and download.