Free apps from Android Market! (rooted phones)

This might be old news, but for those who hasn’t quite figured it out yet: The only “copy protection” Google has arranged for the apps at the market place is the directory which they installs to.
These directories is /data/app and /data/app-private. With a stock ROM you won’t be able to read this dir, but with a rooted phone is just to easy!

Either you could install “Root Explorer” from Android market or just use adb. I prefer the latter.

The first thing you do is to connect your phone with an USB-cable, download a paid app (dont worry, you will get your refund and your app, then run in terminal:

adb shell to enter the shell on your phone
su to become superuser
cd /data/app
or
cd /data/app-private
Now, find your application, lets say its name is something like “com.dev.phoneapp.apk”

cp com.dev.phoneapp.apk /sdcard/

Now you have copied the application from a hidden directory and on to your SD, all you gotta do is to uninstall and get your refund (within 24 hours), and install the APK lying on /sdcard/ using Astro Filemanager or something you prefer.

If you want to use the Root Explorer, just allow the app full root-access, browse to the folder you wanna pull a app from, long press to copy and thats it! Easy huh?

Btw, this is for educational perposes only. Please contribute something, if you could afford a phone like this, you can definitely cough up a buck or two for the developers that is making our days easier!

Enable Android Market (buy apps even when HTC won’t let you)

Download Market Enabler.apk

Be sure to have a rooted phone! It wont work unless you got that right. For rooting, visit e.g MoDaCo or xda-developers and read som forum posts 😉

Now, install the .apk, run it, pick settings list and long press one of the network providers to fake it. Alow root, and it should be mighty fine ;D

Skype on Android? Try Fring!

Well finally!!! God damn it I’ve been looking a long time for such an app, and here it is!
Fring is my new favourite. Just tested it a couple of minutes, but it seems to be working just fine, except for a little lag, but you just have to deal with it.

Download from Android Market or at Fring’s website for free and log in to your GSM, Skype, Google, ICQ, MSN, Twitter, AIM or Yahoo! account through Fring.

Still lack some testing against other mobile fring users, but that’ll be soon 🙂

Please add a comment about your experiences with Fring.

HTC Hero – Using the adb shell commands in Ubuntu!

My god I have been reading a lot in different forum threads, so I think there are more people then me that needs a little help with this.
Tried to gather the most relevant and working methods, and just make a little forum post on how to use the adb (android debug bridge), part of the Google system developement kit (sdk).

Download the SDK .tgz package from google and unpack the android-sdk-linux_x86-1.1_r1 folder.

Move/copy the adb file from ~/’downloadfolder’/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.1_r1/tools/ to e.g /usr/bin/adb
and make it executable (it not already) by

$ sudo cp ~/'downloadfolder'/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.1_r1/tools/adb /usr/bin/
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/adb

or export $PATH as wanted.

Now that you have “installed” adb, all you gotta do us run adb to see the help file

$ sudo adb


Now you can see the help file, and all the commands you can insert. Start off with plugin in your Android device, and run
$ su
$ adb device
$ adb logcat

and you can see your mobile listed, (the number that is shown is your serial number) and then a full log of whats happening on your phone. Try doing different stuff while running logcat, you’ll understand.
To find out a little more about what you can do, visit Googles ADB site.

HTC Hero exposed to humidity, now… it’s (probably) broken

My beloved HTC Hero has been gently lying in my pocket for about one and a half month now, and I must admit, I have never broken a phone as fast as this.
I woke up this morning, answered a couple of e-mails, texted a message to my girlfriend and everything seemed to be just fine. Went to school to discover that the SIM-card wasn’t registered (used to happen because of a little slack on the SIM-lock), tried to restart my phone but it wouldnt boot up again.

I then sat down, opened up the back lid and removed my battery, to see slight tracks of water beneath the battery and the moisture inidicatiors were pink, like it was dipped in water or something.
Fortunate for me, I’ve got a friend that has a lot of experience disassembling mobile phones and repearing these, so I’ve said my prayers and left it all up to him.

The curious thing about this, is that I was able to boot it up in Recovery Mode with the USB connected, so I was able to do a nandroid backup. Now I want you all to pray with me, that I wont loose my precious phone and the money that comes with it…

So for all of you owners of a new phone with the latest in electronics; keep your devices away from any sort of water, I havent used mine even in the rain, but appearently, my pockets aren

Android 1.6

While we are waiting for Android 1.6 we can watch this video ;D Are looking forward to making reviews on different android apps, since 1.6 feauture screenshots without having the need to have a rooted phone.

Best filemanager for Android

I see a lot of people are talkin about Linda File Manager, but I’ve been trying this app and I cant say it beats Astro.
Have been using Astro for uninstalling/installing apps, backup, SD card usage overview and process managing (now using TasKiller, awesome app) and it has a sweet look.
Please check it out, download from Android Market!