Android Development

The T-Mobile G1 is on sale in the US for about 3 weeks now. It seems to be a quite popular phone and there already appeared some phones on ebay in the US as well as in Europe.

Yesterday I was checking out the Hong Kong mobile phone dealers on the Google / T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream). While Hong Kong is usually quite quick with new products (especially mobile phones) the G1 was not available for a while. The online shopping market is not really existing here at the moment and therefor, it is always good to check out local stores. The two best places in Hong Kong for imported gadget and high end stuff (including gadgets that are never going to be released in other markets because HK is the electronics companies’ playground) are:

• Tsim Sha Tsui
• Mong Kok

So I checked nearly every shop I could find and some of them had the T-Mobile G1 in their showcases. I was even allowed to touch one!

The G1’s price range in those shops was:

• Maximum: HK$4980 (~US$642)
• Minimum: HK$3500 (~US$451)

As you can see there is big difference of nearly US$200 between the offers but the lower price seems to be a good deal. Here are some photos from the good priced one in the shop on Nathan Road:

As far as I remember it is near Nathan Road no. 123 but I am not that sure. Might be in Burlington House or very nearby.

By default the Android emulator does not have an SD card enabled. I was looking for this while I tried to save some images which I viewed on the Android browser within the emulator. The emulator told me that it can not download / save the image because there is no SD card installed. Well, I would also save this on the phone’s memory … but it seems the emulator / Android OS does not like that.

However, enabling the SD card is compared to other device simulators quite cumbersome but it works and if you did it once it is pretty easy though. In the end it is a runtime configuration (additional parameter) to start the emulator with an SD card image file. So this needs to be done just once for each runtime / debug configuration in Eclipse. I just made that and it works fine. As I am using Mac OS X & Eclipse the following examples are for this platform. If you are running Linux or Windows you might need to adjust the paths but it should be fairly easy.

1. Create an SD card image file

In the command line you just enter the following commands:

$ cd /Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86-1.0_r1/tools/

$ ./mksdcard 256M /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Documents/workspace/android_sdcard

You can now check if the file has been created but if there is no error it should be there. You can also adjust the size if you want to have a smaller SD card image or even a bigger one.

2. Tell your Android emulator you want to start with that SD card image file

Therefor, go to: “Debug » Debug Configurations… » [select or create an Android Application debug configuration] » Target” and enter at “Additional Emulator Command Line Options” the following:

-sdcard /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Documents/workspace/android_sdcard

Unfortunately, the Android debugger setup (at least in SDK 1.0 R1) does not take eclipse variables like ${workspace_loc} and therefor we need the full path in here. Anyway, this might look like:

That’s it. Hit “Apply” and then “Debug” to start the emulator with your SD card.

Note: If your emulator is still running from the last test please close it first.

Looks pretty easy and very smooth. Especially the Zuma-like game impressed me!

Hi folks,

today I have a request which seems to be a quite important issue to me. Unfortunately, I am not located in the US so I cannot get a Google G1 phone from T-Mobile.

Everyone who ever programmed for mobile devices knows best that you better have a device you can test your application on. Though there are simulators available (and I have to say the Android simulator is really good!) it is still somehow different to have a real phone. The whole process of creating the application, writing code, building the binary, installing it on the device, and finally running the program on the device needs to be tested together. This also leads me to the point that there will be perfomance differences between the device simulator on your PC or MAC and the actual “real” phone in your hand. Mobile phone CPU’s (aka processors) are mostly lower powered than your desktop computer (well compare the power G1 one to my first 8086 PC … :)) and therefor the programs we write perform different on the device.

Conclusion: A real device is necessary.

So if anyone of you has a G1 left for me please feel free to drop a comment and I will send you an email then. No worries, your email address will never go public here.