Droid X

Hey everyone, sorry I've been kind of mooky with updating, I had a rough week. Now i'm ready for lots of writing to come however. Today let's talk about the Droid X by Motorola. This is a great phone running Android 2.2, it originally came out in July of last year running 2.1 and has updated OTA since then. This is a pretty powerful phone for right now, although it will probably be outclassed by the newer dual cores that are beginning to appear on the European market currently. Most of those phones are running nVidia's Tegra 2 chipset to run more graphically demanding games and gaining better HD decoding. The Droid X has an OMAP 3630 1 GHz processor that helps to keep winodw transitions and background apps from getting slow. This device is honestly once of the best to experience Android on currently due its snappiness and powerful internals. The screen is also very nice coming in at 4.3 inches with a 854x480 resolution and this is really its only major fault. Seeing a higher resolution screen would have been nice, but the sheer size of it seems to make up for the lack of this. Watching movies is a great experience and it's even great for storing and carrying all those big movies and files you have. With 8 GB of internal storage and a 16 GB card included, this device can carry massive amounts of multimedia. It also has a pretty nice modding community over at XDA, giving it multiple ROMs to test out. Some ones that I can recommend are Liberty by Kejar, FlyX by Birdman, and GummyJar 2.5 which I am running right now. These are cool because they are incorporating large elements of Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and run even faster than the stock software. The only bad things about this phone are the MotoBlur garbage and and the locked down bootloader. Judging by Motorola's new stance on rooting the Xoom tablet, their policies may be about to change on their locked down devices. Best of luck and technology freedom to everyone!

Rooting

Today, I want to cover the concept of rooting your Android phone. What this refers to is gaining root access to the system, allowing the user to install different apps, UIs and ROMs. The instructions I will provide today focus on completing this process using z4root. Quoting from the original post on xda-developers, this app provides a permanent root option on the following phones. Samsung Galaxy S (All variants), Backflip,Sony X10,Xperia Mini,Droid 2, Galaxy Tab, Galaxy I5700, Galaxy 3 I5800, Droid X, Samsung Acclaim, Cricket Huawei Ascend, Motorola Cliq, Huawei 8120, Hero, G1, Optimus T,Droid 1, Garmin Asus A50, Motorola Defy, LG Ally, Motorola Flipside, Motorola Milestone 2, Dell streak, X10 Mini Pro, Smartq v7 Android 2.1. If your phone is on that list, then download the apk for z4root from the link I uploaded it too. Donations can go to the paypal posted on the forum post. Alright so now you should have this apk on your computer. Now place the apk on your phone's SD card; this can be done by plugging it into your computer and then moving the file to a known folder on the SD card. After this, you may remove the connection from the phone to the computer and then you can find the apk using ASTRO File Manager or any file browser. A prompt should then come onto the screen from Android asking you if you would like to install that apk. After choosing next, and looking at the permissions, accept the prompt and install the app. One of the problems that people have at this step is that they fail to enable "USB Debugging", this took me a while to work out. This option can be found by going to Settings > Applications > Development > USB Debugging. Then go back and enable "Unknown Sources" if you haven't already, this will allow you to install the apk if you were unable to do it before. After you open the app, it should have a button that simply says "root". Click this button, and your phone should do some stuff, if the app freezes in the middle you can go to Settings> Applications> Manage Applications> Whatever app it is and click force stop. Try restarting the app afterwards to give it another shot. In the next post, I will talk about what you should do with your new root access including the best apps you can now use.

First Post

Well I just wanna write a quick introduction to this blog. I'll be covering every aspect of Android within my posts on this blog, posting at least twice a day on different topics, unless i decide to do a follow up on a previous one. Android is growing as a market now and has shown great potential to be a large player in the smartphone market, it is also well supported by Google. Actually let me just get it out of the way now. Fragmentation of Android really can't be blamed on Google at all. For those of you who don't know what fragmentation is, it is basically the complaint that different phones are running all different versions of Android such as the Droid running 2.2 and the Nexus S running 2.3, causing complications for consumers in purchasing their phones and getting the most out of the ones that they have. Samsung especially has held back updates that had been pushed by Google months before and this has stopped their devices from upgrading from even 2.1. The manufacturers are placing their UI's over the AOSP which causes the delays in OTA upgrades. I would also like to help address this problem, so I will also be posting instructions and links to articles that can upgrade older Android phones easily. There will also be posts covering ROM's and rooting including links to ROMs for specific phones and instructions for them so check back for those. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at brassman1990@gmail.com and I will be glad to check them out and email back or maybe make a post out of your problem.