Just some days ago we wrote about the Dream G2 Phone “Made in China” that looks like Android but isn’t one.

On that same show I took a flyer with their product showcase and it listed not just the fake Android phone. Bluelans actually plans to publish a real Android powered mobile phone in July 2009. At least that’s what they told me. I am not sure if they can hold their roadmap and release but it would be great to have another Android on the market! When I saw the fake one I first thought: “Why don’t they just take the free Android OS and put it on a phone rather than using a crappy Chinese OS and lots of programmers to wirte a fake Android User Interface?

Anyway, here is the data of the upcoming N12 SciPhone from Bluelans; if it will ever be released:

• Processor: Marvell Monahands (624MHz) + Qualcomm MSM6246
• Operating system: Android/ Windows Mobile
• Dimensions: 117*58*12.7
• Mode: UMTS-2100MHz, GSM-900/1800/1900 MHz
• Bearer: GSM, 3G(WCDMA)
• Display: WQVGA 240*400 pixels, 3.2 inch TFT 262K
• Main camera: 3.2M pixel
• Secondary Camera: 0.1M pixel
• Storage: ROM-256MB+64MB, RAM-256MB+64MB
• Extended Storage: Micro SD, up to 16GB
• USB: USB 2.0 high speed
• Bluetooth: Ver 2.0
• GPS: Yes
• WiFi: IEEE 802.11b/11g
• TV: CMMB
• Battery capacity: 1000mAh
• Standby time(GSM): Up to 220 hours
• Voice talk time(2G): Up to 170 minutes

Here you can download the original scanned Flyer which I took from the fair: N12 SciPhone with real Android OS Flyer.

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.