Wednesday, September 01, 2010

I own a Samsung Galaxy, that is an Android phone, one that has been available for more then 2 years already. By default it comes with Android 1.5, this is a rather old version, but it didn't matter much because 1.5 was the most targeted Android release. This was changing quickly during the last few months when more and more apps became available for higher versions only. This became rather frustrating as my buddies at work installed one cool app after the other and i couldn't. Ofcourse Android phone are upgradable, and the Galaxy is no different. These are not official releases, but they work just as well (or in this case, even better) then what the vendor pushes out of the door.
I can confirm the Samsung Galaxy to be an awful device in this respect, its internal workings are totally different from normal android phones and this causes a lot of tools not to work, even the official ones from the Android SDK. It boggles the mind why Samsung did this and i really hope they revised this strategy for the new Galaxy S and the soon to be released tablet (which looks pretty cool btw). Not to mention that the instructions from the Andoid dev site contain errors.

The last one will cause problems for everybody, not just Galaxy owners. The dev site refers to a very old version of (Ubuntu) linux, why they have not updated this is beyond me. the actual content of '/etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules' should be:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{04e8}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
Unless you implement the above, you will never be able to access your Android phone for debugging purposes.

Next, the Adroid debugger 'adb' included with the SDK does not work with the Galaxy, you need a special, unofficial version which you can download here. Just put ungzip it where your current 'adb' is and you should be set to upgrade (or debug) your phone.