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.

Yes. Internet has never been safer, but only few things on it. Now, Google shows that everything in the world is a Harmful Site.

As some great fellow told, ‘No computer safe is unless it has been switched off, hidden few meters underground’ – Google has been ‘compromised’.

Edit: Google posted on their blog about the problem and itseems the problem was human error processing the list from StopBadware.org, Once again Google saves the day. It wasn’t compromised.

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 ;)

Google introduced a new feature in Gmail service. Gmail now shows last 5 access types and IP addresses which accessed the current account and lets you end sessions from other locations (where you might have hit remember me option)

Seriously, this is one kick ass feature I’ve been looking for in gmail and they’ve done it with a sweet add-on (I never expected the remote sign-off feature) and for this feature, love you Google.

Don’t ask me why I’ve covered my IP address, I’ve no clue why I did that. May be because, I usually find IP addresses and IDs concealed in screenshots.

Google is a great company. It sure is. What ever Microsoft has done to IBM twenty years ago (I’ve no clue about it as I was three years that time, but I read this a lot of times whenever I read about Google. Being a hardcore fan of Google, I believed it) Google has done to Microsoft few/five years before. Now, Google is the same awkward position in which Microsoft was(is). Google has lost its “That Company” tag among the Great Engineers and others of the IT world. Now, its not the hottest/coolest place for those great guys to work. Welcome the the new kid in the block, who is becoming Google’s Google - Facebook.

I saw an article in TechCrunch - Facebook stealing Googlers at an alarming rate. Facebook knows the best place to get engineers just like Google knew when it was growing from 100s to fifteen-thousand. It has recruited much talent from Microsoft, and now, its losing talent to Facebook. Here is a note from Justin Rosenstein telling that Facebook is “That Company”

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven’t already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I’m serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you’re an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg — whatever it takes.

Well, yeah. <sarcasm>So true. Facebook is the best company to work for</sarcasm> There are two things to consider here as reasons. One is money, second is passion. Money is the obvious reason for many guys to switch a company. Facebook is a hot company right now and its going to become public, and its offering stock options - any guy with working brain can see lots of potential money in front of him. So, they are switching to Facebook. There is another interesting version of reasoning and it is “it’s not just about the money. Entrepreneurs want to work at the hottest place on earth and right now that’s Facebook.” Well, as always, for any story, there will be “My Version”, “Your Version” and “The Truth”.

Here, the possible truth could be the combination of money-factor, hottest-place-factor and not-a-big-company-factor, as many intelligent people prefer to work for themselves or a small company rather than a big company. Google is no-more the new kid in the block, its been nine years and is fifteen-thousand-employees in size. Microsoft did a big mistake when Google was small, it should have acquired it. When, Google became big, it was nothing but a search-engine, now its competing with Microsoft in all possible fields. Right now, Facebook could be just a social-networking platform, but who knows what it got in its bag for us in the future.