In one of my previous posts I mentioned few interesting things that can be done with your Android phone. Well, if you wanna go ‘Droid’ you better know few of these things.

As of now - Tuesday, 11th of August 2009, 1.45 AM, few variants of HTC Magic phones are not rootable. Yeah, you cant root few models. No Root = No fancy stuff like your own distro or custom builds or Hero or Wifi Tether and many more things.

Android phone will just yet another phone if you cannot root it. It will be just pretty icons. And as boring as a regular Nokia crappy phone if you cannot root it.

So, remember these things before buying yourself an Android. This is especially for Indian folks, as Airtel is shipping HTC Magic in India.

• Don’t buy Airtel branded HTC Magic. I don’t hate Airtel too much, but the technical reason is the board on Airtel branded HTC Magic has SPL hboot version 1.33.0010 As of now, it is NOT rootable. The other SPLs which are not rootable are - 1.33.0006 and 1.33.0004. So, stay away from those Magic phones.
• Airtel branded phone doesn’t have Google applications in it. So - No Gmail, No Google Talk, No sync with Google contacts, No Google Maps/Latitude which S.U.X big time. I’m still not able to understand why would someone ship a half baked phone by crippling it without its basic important features. So, you are actually spending 25K INR on a phone which doesn’t do anything more than a regular phone.
• Android doesn’t support bluetooth transfer yet. Its a no biggie, but just for your information. Don’t complain later. People who share files over bluetooth, Sorry.

Well, just for recap - No buying HTC Magic with SPLs 1.33.0004 (HTC Magic Japan), 1.33.0006 (TMobile Mytouch 3G), 1.33.0010 (Many versions including Airtel HTC Magic) till they are rooted. You can check the progress at xda-developers forum. Google Ion is rootable.

In order to check the SPL of your mobile, turn off the mobile. Then turn it on by pressing the volume button down and power button together. It will take you to the fastboot screen. And you can find the board model in first line (32B, in this image). HBoot version in second line (1.33.0009 in this image). I think, if your model has SHIP S as OFF in the first line, thats a rootable model. So, if you can check, just check the SPL info before buying the phone.

So, what if you had already bought the phone with one of the dreaded Perfect SPL ? Well, by now you would have understood that your phone doesn’t do anything more than an ordinary phone. This is especially about Airtel branded HTC Magic phones. They don’t even have the awesome Google stuff (I’m not sure about other brands). This is what you can do.

As you have realized that there is no Android Market on your phone, there is no way of installing any applications on your phone. Actually, no. There is a method. But at the same time, there is a problem though, that you cannot install applications which require other libraries like PDF Apps or new IMEs or even applications dealing with Maps. For any installing any other app, you can follow this method. You will have to first goto Settings - Applications - Check install from Unknown Sources. And also, Enable USB debugging.

Now, there are two options for you. One is Open Market. Another is searching for the applications online and installing them using the ADB command of the Android SDK tools. The first option gives you something similar the Android market.

In the second option, you will have to download the application (Google is your friend) and install the application/the APK file by using the command adb install [Filename].apk

The second option can be made easier, if you can first install ‘Astro File Manager’ by using above command, then you can just copy the other applications to the SD card and install them using Astro.

Now, your phone is far better than the stock phone Airtel had rubbed on you. Of course, this is just until some one releases a hack for the so called Perfect SPL. When that happens, your phone can be magically made into an Awesome Droid.

Edit : Bala posted a nice illustration on how useful the current Airtel branded HTC Magic is to an end user. Check it here.

Update on 15 Aug 2009: For daredevils, Guys at XDA have released info on how to fix Perfected SPL. After that, of course, you can root your Magic. If you are not technical and daring enough, it seems HTC is going to release an update for Indian users next month, so wait for it.

I’ve been working on and about Android from last couple of months. I ended up learning few nice things about android from XDA developers and web sites of few other android hackers/developers. Starting with few bad things - No android phone is released in India yet - Google/HTC - WTF ? Ofcourse, Google is selling its ADP1 (Android Developer Phone 1, in other words completely SIM unlocked HTC Dream a.k.a TMobile G1) for Indian crowd, but the phone+shipping can become unnecessarily expensive. But,  anyway few lucky folks with friends coming from US, who went to US or whose company is good enough to provide them with an Android phone (Yay !!) are lucky enough to get their hands on HTC Dream. But, anyway not-so lucky guys can always get the awesome emulator from Android site. Coming to the interesting things that you can do with your phone, well, these are NOT for guys who are scared of command line, who do not understand terms like root, or people who are just too scared of spoiling their phones and ESPECIALLY NOT for people who doesnt RTFM. If you are wondering what the hell is RTFM, you might want to buy an iPhone ;) Kidding anyway. Android is awesome platform out of the box, but it can be done more awesome by doing some nicer stuff to it. Now, you should know few things/terms here.

1. ADP1 - Android Developer Phone 1 (Google branded, Black one with fancy design on it) - images
2. G1 - T Mobile G1 (Black/White TMobile branded phone with Google logo on the back) - images
3. G2/Magic/Sapphire (Vodafone branded HTC Magic phone, G2 - is just made up by people. Sapphire is probably HTC code name) - images
4. Google Ion - HTC Magic phone given by Google the attendees of 2009 Google I/O conference

Now, all the above phones + few more phones (chinese stuff like Lenovo Ophone etc.,) run Android. So, if you get your hands on any of the above phones, you can do few nice things with it.

1. Root the Phone Rooting the phone - simply means that you get ‘root’ access on the phone. So, unless you possess root you cannot feel the true potential of your Android (linux) phone. But .. wait … what is root ? If that is your question, you wasted 5 minutes of your precious time by reading this useless post. You can simply return your useless linux phone and live with a Nokia phone happily ever after.Rooting is a fairly simple process if you RTFM. But, beware that it can brick(break) your phone if you are careless. So, if at all you decide to root your phone, DO read the instructions carefully on XDA or Android-Dls.com and the try it.
2. Change the bootloader This is not a fancy thing that you can do with your phone, but more of an essential thing if you decide to play with your phone. Check this thread on XDA and install the Hard SPL. G1s will have the default G1 Original SPL, where as ADP1 will have Engineering SPL. I’m just not sure what SPL does Ion and Magic have (probably the newer one which is not listed on that page). HardSPL is the recommended one.There is a newer SPL (1.33.2005) which actually bricked many phones. This SPL is the most useful as it increases system and data partitions of your phone by 30 megs each. Which means, you can do more fancy stuff with your phone. If you decide to go with this SPL, - Do check your Board type … and research on which board you can install, Make sure that flashed your phone with latest Radio, And make sure that you will never go back to older radios on the phone.The essential part of modifying SPL is you can apply NBH update files (I hardly did this), and flash nand backups (I do this a LOT). Its simply means, you can take back up of your phone and save them on your computer, and whenever you manage to spoil your phone, *if you have Engg./HardSPL* you can simply flash that backup back on your phone.
3. Install the ‘n’ awesome ‘custom’ android builds Simon Walker is maintaining a very good list with all the available Android Builds, features, requirements, dates etc., here. If you’ve time, try out all of them and stick to the one you like ‘teh best’. Each of them is great in its own way.
4. Compile your own ‘Android’ distro If you are more into ‘my own’ things, you can always download the android source and build the images for your ‘dream’ (Only Dream is released ADP1, thats why Google has instructions only for building for HTC Dream. But, by the time you play a lot with those Custom builds And your own distro (#3 and #4 points here), you will understand how you can play with your ‘Magic’. And there is XDA all the time.
5. Edit your boot splash screens and theme your distro Same as what it tells. There is no better way to show your love for customization than changing your Splash screen or making your own theme for your phone. Well, you can start that by reading stuff here
6. Wifi/Bluetooth Tether It just means that you can share your phone’s internet (Edge/GPRS/3G) connection to your computer over wifi. The whole process is simplified a lot by few applications. I suggest Android Wifi Tether which is just an awesome opensource application. The whole process needs some  features enabled on your kernel, so, it works only on rooted phones with kernel with iptables and netfilter support
7. And few more and just don’t forget to do some kickass things like using applications Shopsavvy, Locale, Wikitude, Twidroid, Barcode Scanner, Google latitude, Google Skymap. You can find all the list of applications available in Google Android Market over web at Cyrket (No, its not Cricket, its Cyrket)
8. …. and try to be a Hero This is more related to #3. But, this is so awesome that it does need a separate point to talk about. Install HTC Hero with Rosie UI. This requires you to know fairly enough about Android builds. Anyway, you can see the Rosie demo for yourself on Youtube here

Out of the endless possibilities of ‘awesome’ things, these are few nice things that you can do with your Android phone. Anyway, as usual I take no responsibility for what ever you do with your phone. No, I’m not going to help you with rooting your phone or any other thing here. I gave links to the sources of information and you can learn easily from them.

Well, this could be the result after a year of Android.

Google could pretty much record everything and maintain a history …

Or even do this … yeah, they are quite capable ;)