But What Does It MEAN!?

So we’ve got quite a few new Droid users that I know of this week, and with that, it’s time to take it to the basics.

Here’s a compiled list of the most common abbreviations or keywords you’ll see being thrown around on this site and many others, as it relates to Android.

Use this as a reference if you’re ever unsure of an abbreviation or phrase you’re unclear on.

adb: Android Debug Bridge, a versatile tool lets you manage the state of an emulator instance or Android-powered device

ADK: Android Development Kit, What people use to develop anything for the droid such as ROM’s

Baseband: In communications and signal processing, the baseband describes signals and systems whose range of the frequencies measured from close to 0 hertz to a cut-off frequency, a maximum bandwidth or highest signal frequency; it is sometimes used to describe frequencies starting close to zero

Boot Loader: State in which the droid can be flashed from RSD with an appropriate .sdk file that reprograms the phone into a specific ROM or update. This is typically a last resort when the recovery screen cannot be reached to make a much simpler and less risky solution

Boot Loop: simply means something is preventing the phone from completing it’s boot cycle and is stuck between the boot animation and the unlock screen, creating a looped animation. This is often fixed by either reloading a Nandroid, or Reflashing a rom from the Boot Loader.

Brick or Bricked: Jargon for a completely unrecoverable device, (no more than a brick or paperweight)

Bug or Software Bug: an Error or flaw in software that produces a failure or unexpected/unwanted result. Typically created from incorrect code, this is why some ROMs are better and smoother running than others because certain developers have taken the time to input “perfect” code

Busybox: BusyBox is a single multi-call binary that packages the functionality of most widely used standard Unix tools, BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

ClockworkMod: A recovery program that is often used to apply updates, ROMs, or create a back up or restore a backup file

De–odex: Apk files have respective odexes that devs use to supposedly save space. Deodexing means you convert it back to a .dex file and put it back inside the apk. This allows you to easily replace files (not having to worry about odexes), but the main point was to deodex services.jar so that you can change all text to different colors (such as the clock color to white) and to deodex services.jar, you need to deodex everything.

Dev. or Developer: An individual that creates, or alters a file in such a manner as to advance the program

Flash or Flash Memory: a program technology that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed

Froyo: Short for Frozen Yogurt, is the latest iteration (2.2) of Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

Kernel: The governor of the CPU usage and Battery output, one can upload certain Kernels to achieve greater performance speed of their device at the cost of some battery life

Root: Common word associated with giving a user “super user” access to their phones programming and other various aspects that would normally not be possible, also known as “Jailbroken” for iPhone’s

Nandroid or Nandroid Backup: A file typically created in the custom recovery program, such as SPRecovery, that is a carbon copy of whatever state your phone is in before a drastic change is made. the file then can be moved onto or off of the SD card for later use in case something should go wrong in the ROM or Update, or a Boot Loop occurs

OS: Operating system, I.E. Windows Vista or MAC or ANDROID

Overclocking: Speeding up the CPU past the factory presets to achieve a faster and more responsive device

ROM: Read Only Memory, a program used to make changes to anything from the look of the home screen, to icons to custom boot animation

RSD or RSD lite: Remote Software Download, Motorola’s own tool in flashing virtually any type of program, (so long as it’s in .sbf form) to the Android OS

Shell or SSH: secure shell or ssh is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices

SPR or SPRecovery: A recovery program that is often used to apply updates, ROMs, or create a back up or restore a backup file

Stock: Simply means an unaltered state, such as when you first purchase your phone from Verizon, or when you do a factory reset

SU: “Super user”, or root permissions

Theme: A set of icons, backgrounds and app trays that change the ascthetics of the overall look of the droid and its applications

TUN/TAP: Refers to a network Tunnel, operates within layer 3 packets, or ip packets. Packets sent by a system via a TUN/TAP device are delivered to a user-space program that attaches itself to the device. A user space program may also pass packets into a TUN/TAP device. In this case TUN/TAP device delivers (or “injects”) these packets to the operating system’s network stack thus emulating their reception from an external source.

Underclocking: Slowing down the CPU mainly to limit battery usage

.sbf: Summation Briefcase File

.apk or APK’s: An .apk file extension denotes an Android Package (APK) file, an .apk file can be opened and inspected using common archive tools

.tar: Similar to a zip file, a tar file archives multiple files into one file

.tgz: TGZ files are commonly used as install packages for Linux.

With that, we’ll be focusing on the Droid X over the next few days, but there will be a few gems thrown in that will include the Droid 1 and Droid 2, so stay tuned!

Jobs Takes Dig At Android, Google Sets Him Straight

I’m normally not one to get into the whole fanboy war between iPhone and Android owners.  But Steve made a comment today at the Apple press conference that they activate 230,000 iOS devices a day, adding that,

“We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers”

Taking a direct stab at Eric Schmidt’s statement last month saying Android was activating 200,000 devices a day.

Well it didn’t take long before an official Google spokesperson came out with the following:

“The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.”

So not only did Google achieve this milestone a month ago (meaning they’ve probably surpassed 230,000 activations per day, easily, with the number of new high-end devices launched this month and last) but they’re not even counting all the devices running Android.  This is most likely because devices running Google services natively require you to sign in to your account initially from the phone before doing anything, so this is an accurate way for Google to get their own numbers of how many devices are being activated with their OS.

So nice try Jobs, but maybe you should focus on telling people how to use and hold their devices, and what technologies they do and don’t need to use on those devices, and leave activating the most devices per day to Android.

Source: Fortune

Anyone Want A Pay-As-You-Go Droid?

Well I didn’t see this one coming.  According to Androiddoes.net, starting tomorrow (9/2) you can go into Verizon, buy almost any smartphone, and activate it on a pay-as-you-go plan.  Pictured above is the list of devices that will be allowed to be used for this plan type.  Below you can find the pricing comparison between different pay as you go offerings from other networks.

This is a great way for someone with bad credit, no credit, or simply might not be old enough to get mom or dad to sign a 2 year contract for them.  If you think you can foot the bill, but just couldn’t find a way to get in before, this is your chance.  As you can see from the list, you can grab any of the popular Droid series phones, as well as BlackBerry’s and other’s.  Also note if you happen to have one of these lying around from a recent upgrade, used phones can be activated on one of these plans as well.

Which Android Device Has The Best Battery Life?

Well as you can see from the chart above, the Droid X takes the cake! (Which as an owner I’m pretty happy about!)

I’m surprised to not see the Droid 1 on the chart, but I guess it has hit its end of life at Verizon already.  So we can see the Droid X and Droid 2 are the two top main stream phones on the list for battery time.  The Dell Streak which was just silently launched by Dell rates up between the two, but I’m unsure if that device is trying to be classified as a phone or a tablet.

Next Android OS After Gingerbread To Be Named Honeycomb

Techradar is reporting that multiple sources have confirmed that the next iteration of Google’s Android operating system after Gingerbread this holiday season will be called Honeycomb.

For those not following, all of Androids major OS updates have been accompanied by a codename from some kind of sweet treat, e.g., Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread.  Next letter up is H, and with that we get Honeycomb.

Not much more is out about this right now other than it’s name.  And since we haven’t even seen gingerbread (3.0 launch yet, or announce a launch, I wouldn’t expect much on this anytime soon.

Until then lets enjoy the onslaught of new Android phones and tablets coming before the end of the year!

Source: TechRadar.com

Adobe Android Summit – Highlights

So we got a lot of information from Adobe today at the Adobe Android Summit.  Ok, so maybe it was more a lot of details on a few specific technologies, but it was chock-full of goodness either way.

Here’s the most prominent things to take away from Adobe’s Summit –

• Flash 10.1
  • Flash 10.1 took 12 months to develop
  • It will not run on older Android device
  • It is officially out of the beta stage today and can e found in the market (although reports claim only nexus one owners are finding it)

Adobe Android Summit is Today!

Today is the Adobe Android Summit in San Francisco!  I think anyone following Android knows pretty much what to expect as the “major” announcements, but I’m hoping for a few surprises up Adobe’s sleeve. 

If you’re not eating, sleeping, and breathing Android like me, then what you might not know is that in two days on August 18th, Adobe plans to take its flash player for Android out of beta, and into the wild.  There has also been leaked copies of Adobe AIR available for Android as well, so expect some information on that as well.  These two technologies will make Android a very appealing platform to develop for (if it wasn’t already) and should help bring even more great developers and applications to the good side.

Stay tuned throughout the day for updates and announcements!

Paypal to become an integrated payment system on Android?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, three un-named sources claim that Paypal is in negotiations to become an integrated payment system for Android.  This could be another way for app developers to easily get paid, and sway them to develop for Android. 

This would obviously mean an addition to the way you can purchase apps as well.  On top of talks that you’ll soon be able to charge apps to your wireless bill through android, I have a feeling app sales will be on the rise soon. (Or we’ll have some extrememly PO’d parents!)  Oh, and these sources say this will come before the end of this year.

Story here.

Oracle Sues Google Over Patent Infringement.

And it starts.  Another patent battle.  Another legal issue for Google.  And another case of someone saying “Hey, they’re making what we made up, popular! We want some of that action!” 

Do I think Oracle is in the wrong for filing a lawsuit over digital patents?  Yes, absolutely.  But at the same time I think they should be credited with the “idea” of Java and what it offers and its versatility.  The loophole here is that Google is not using pure Java to run Android or write any of their Apps.  They’re using Dalvik.  As well, Java won’t natively run on an Android device, it has to be compiled into Java first, using the Linux-based kernel no less, and then it’s ready to run. 

I think the bigger issue at hand is Oracle.  Is this the future for Java now that they purchase Sun?  If you want to excel with a technology simply based off of Java, are you going to have to go through Oracle first?  Java is already in a vast majority of main stream devices, and although I’m sure they’re all paying royalties for it, but shouldn’t an open platform….well, be open?

Full story here.

Droid 2 is a go!

Yesterday the Droid 2 launched from Verizon Wireless and Motorola.  This is the replacement for the Droid 1, and still has the (updated) physical slide out QWERTY keyboard.  This is packing an OMAP 3640 processor running at 1GHZ, and is the first Android phone to ship with 2.2 Froyo!

There is a promotion going on for early upgrades as well right now. Make sure to keep your eye out in your mail if you’re a current Verizon customer. They are letting you upgrade to any smart phone at the 2 year contract price IF you meet the conditions.  Basically, your service contract end date needs to be by December of 2010, as well as you must NOT be currently eligible for a new every two, or annual upgrade promotion.  This promotion ends August 31st, so if you’re interested in checking it out you only have about 2 weeks left!  You can also simply call or stop in your local Verizon Wireless retail store and have them look up on your account if you’re eligible for this promotion.

Will have a review of the Droid 2 coming soon! In the mean time, check out what the guys over at iFixit did to this shiny new device.  It never stood a chance!

Droid 2 Dismantled!