Android developer extraordinaire, Doomlord from the XDA-Developers forums has managed to successfully root the Sony Xperia Z before most customers have even bought theirs yet!

The fast turn around was a team effort by Doomlord modifying the code of a Nexus 4 root, while Teamviewer remotely tested the code on read-world devices. The effort managed to be a success, with other forum members offering that the root has worked for them also.

If you’re looking to pick up a Sony Xperia Z and hope to root it as soon as you get home, be sure you are fully confident with what you are doing, as their isn’t a recovery tool available just yet. You have been warned.

[ Source ]

The post Sony Xperia Z Already Rooted appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

According to the US Copyright Office, the act of jailbreaking a mobile phone does not violate any copyright laws. If you happen to use a jailbroken iPhone to side-load some illegally-acquired applications, that’s still illegal, but the actual jailbreaking itself is fine. However, the US Copyright Office does say that this ruling does not apply to tablets, including the iPad. They say that the “category of tablets is difficult to define,” so they haven’t made any sort of over-arching statement about that product category yet.

The issue at hand was described as thus:

“Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer programs on the telephone handset.”

The idea is that smartphones could get tied down the manufacturer or carrier to block the installation of certain “software applications,” so the act of jailbreaking to allow this installation becomes fair game under the DMCA. Realistically, given that tablets can be subsidized by carriers and such, I don’t see how they’re legally all that different from their smartphone counterparts. Your thoughts?

[Source]

The post US Govt: Legal to Jailbreak iPhone, Still Illegal to Jailbreak iPad? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The new Galaxy Note 10.1 GT-N8000 is so easy to root that the method for doing so was discovered almost instantly after the announcement of the new tablet. What’s involved? Not much actually, and the best part is that rooting the way mentioned below will still allow you to get OTA updates.

The method for rooting, as mentioned below, was first posted by RootGalaxyNote.com, and specifically injects European firmware. If you aren’t from this region, you can still install this without an issue, as long as it doesn’t bother you that your device will now appear as a European device instead of your native country model.

With that in mind, here are the steps involved:

Step 1: Hold down power and volume buttons together for about 15 seconds to launch into ODIN downloadable mode. When the warning screen pops up, hit the volume up button.

Step 2: Connect a Galaxy Note USB cable to your computer.

Step 3: Now you’ll need to download ODIN and the XXLGA Stock European Firmware. Unzip both files, you should get a folder with two files for ODIN and another file that ends in “.tar”.

Step 4: You should see a yellow box with a random number, if you don’t you’ll need the Samsung USB drivers. Download and install these, then unplug/plug your Note 10.1 back in and the yellow box should be there.

Step 7: Hit the “PDA” button and choose the stock ROM file ending in “.tar” and hit “Start”.

Step 8: You Note 10.1 will not start updating with the special root injected ROM. If it fails, reboot into the ODIN mode and try again.

Step 9: Once “Pass!” is displayed, everything is done and the system reboot.

That’s all that is involved, pretty straightforward. If you need more help or tips for installing, check out Root Galaxy Note.com.

The post How To: Rooting The Samsung Galaxy 10.1 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

This isn’t an official release from Google, but RootzWiki went ahead and made the Jelly Bean preview update available to the masses right after the Google I/O event. This update was originally intended for the GSM versions of the Galaxy Nexus, but it has been adapted to work with the LTE models too. This means that all Galaxy Nexus models are eligible for the Android 4.1 upgrade.

At this point, absolutely no bugs have been found and the ROM appears to be 100% functional. Of course, if you want to load up this somewhat unofficial version of Jelly Bean on your Galaxy Nexus, you will need to have root access. That said, if you want Google Now, offline voice dictation, and Project Butter speed, this is the only way you’ll get it at the moment.

You can get the “reverse engineered preview build” of Jelly Bean for your VZW Galaxy Nexus on Rootzwiki. Of course, proceed at your own risk.

[Source]

The post Galaxy Nexus Gets Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Early appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

We have heard your voice and starting now, we will allow our bootloader to be unlocked for 2011 models going forward. We plan on releasing the updates that will allow you to unlock your bootloader in the coming months, please keep an eye on this website for more details on which devices will be adding this feature. We are extremely pleased to see the energy and enthusiasm from our fans and loyal customers, and we are excited to see what you are capable of. HTC eagerly anticipates your innovations.

The not so good news is that this step undertaken by HTC is followed by a flurry of caveats and disclaimers of any HTC responsibility for the customers unlocking actions. Even if that brave customer uses an official unlocking tool designed by HTC themselves. Then, the unlocker will work first for the HTC Wildfire S, Wildfire, Salsa, Merge, and Desire brands that account for 22 models. Now, by PDADB data base reports, HTC has more than 500 phones, and it remains to be seen how many of them locked and how many will be presented with an unlocker tool in good time.

Then, the FOTA option for deploying unlocker tool is quite dubious at best: if its designed as FOTA with unlocker, it certainly much safer to have a FOTA upgrade option with factory unlocked bootloader.

Even if the HTC unlocker tool is already available as a separate download, there are some problems with deploying it over what hackers did to their HTC devices already, that is, without HTC help.

But don’t get me wrong, the movement to unlock their devices’ bootloaders widens across manufacturers, and it’s a very good thing. We need to shout this news out to Motorola for the RAZR and Barnes & Noble for the NOOK Tablet.

The post HTC Dev Team Unlocks Bootloaders On Their 2011 Phones appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

As reported by Phandroid, developer WugFresh from GalaxyNexusForum.com has created a Root Toolkit for the Galaxy Nexus that gives you two different functions. Function “Unlock + Root” unlocks the bootloader and roots your device, while “Unroot + OEM Lock” will get you back to factory stock firmware. You can even install the latest Samsung drivers and SDK with a single click, as this screenshot shows.

Here’s a short instruction for deploying this tool:

• Install the program by double clicking the GnexRootToolkit.sfx.exe

• Use the Drivers + SDK option first to install and configure the necessary components to your system
• Click the “Unlock + Root” or “Unroot + OEM lock” buttons depending on what you want to do

• Note that the “Unroot + OEM lock” procedure can also be used to just flash back to stock without re-locking

Download:

There are some caveats while using this tool though. As WugFresh himself has posted:

Your data will be erased when you unlock it. It will say that explicitly on your device when you get to the unlock screen. You need to take your own steps to preserve your data, like backing up your sdcard contents to your computer, using apps like SMS backup+ for your texts.. ect. Once you are rooted though, you can use an app like ROM toolbox or Titanium backup to make full backups of your data and apps, or even better, you can use ClockworkMod to make full backups or your entire device; one of the main benefits of rooting.

Rooting and unlocking Galaxy Nexus was achieved earlier by other developers (Team Black Hat and Snow02), it’s just this simple “one-click” tool that makes it attractive for many more users of Galaxy Nexus. The tool is reported as working fine, as advertised.

The post Galaxy Nexus Root Toolkit Roots And Unlocks Bootloader appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Some of you might remember how much hoopla Amazon played at their Kindle Fire presentation about how fast their wonderful, magic Silk browser is. Well, the circus left town for now, and folks who believed Amazon ended up getting something else instead of swift Silk. There’s a solid Silk browser test review published at Anandtech. In short, theoretical gains in speed for the Silk browser working with Amazon cloud servers can be severely diminished or even reverted by real life limitations of the Fire’s CPU, of  limits on number TCP/IP stack connections and corresponding bandwidth, and by RAM available for Silk operations on Fire. General advice is to not use the main Silk feature, namely “Accelerate Page Loading”, as it seems useless for the Fire at best, and even opposite results in most cases; slower Web page loading compared to “unaccelerated” mode.

The staff geek of Howtogeek website has compiled a simple set of simple measures that can make your Fire’s Silk feel silkier and speedier:

Open up the browser, hit the menu button at the bottom of the screen, hit the Settings button, and then find the following options:

• Enable plug-ins: off
• Accelerate page loading: Unchecked
• Desktop or mobile view: Mobile

You don’t have to change the browser into Mobile view, though we do recommend it. Just disabling Flash and the “accelerate page loading” made a big difference while browsing. You can also change the plug-ins to allow them on demand, but that usually ends up with a lot of annoying prompts, so it’s not usually worth it—it’s worth noting that YouTube still works just fine without the Flash plugin enabled.

What you see here as a result, is the Silk browser stripped of all its silk, so to speak. When in such a state, I bet it’s no different than the stock Android Webkit-based Gingerbread browser.

One thing is trying to improve the performance of the Silk browser, but its just mind blowing how attempting to “improve” it would cause a Fire user such grief that they would easily choose an alternative browser, like side-loaded Opera Mobile with its hardware accelerated Web page rendering.   More radical ways of accelerating Web browsing experiences for the Amazon Kindle Fire could be offered by flashing an Ice Cream Sandwich based custom ROMs on Fire, thus rooting it. That is, when these ROMs would be available for public consumption.

The post How To Increase Kindle Fire Silk Speed appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

XDA-Developers have released their HTC Super Tool, a Windows-based utility that universal roots and unlocks the bootloader of many HTC smartphones. This third-party tool has surpassed even HTC’s bootloader unlocking tool, which is limited to just a few devices. Devices for which this tool has been reported working for include the Evo Design 4G, Evo 4G, Evo 3D, Evo Shift, G2, MT3Gs, MT4G, MT4Gs, Inspire, Sensation, Incredible, Wildfire S, and the Amaze 4G.

In this universality, the HTC Super Tool surpasses HTS’s own unlocking utility that works only on several HTC models.

List of HTC devices that can be rooted and unlocked by the HTC Super Tool is made up out of the phones, for which the success was confirmed. That is, if your HTC phone model is not found as currently listed, chances are Super Tool may work just fine for it, too. For those who follow the HTC Super Tool development, its version history looks like this:

For v2

Added Unroot option

For v1.5

Updated zergRush exploit!
Updated SU files
Cleaned up script
moved market update to it’s own option.

NEW TOOL v1.0

Changes in SS

For v2.1

Minor fix from root and reboot triggers

For v2

De Sense works (Disables HTC Sense for a more vanilla android/keeps the Sense lockscreen though
Re Sense works (Re-Enables HTC Sense)
Virtous OC daemon (I ported to Design to Overclock to 1.4 ghz on stock kernel)
Fixed Wifi Tether again thanks to psyv01 at XDA
Cleaned the script a little bit

For v1.5
removed market updater option (Now updates market via root option
s-off is still just a placeholder (sorry guys)
De Sense option added (Freezes all HTC Sense apps to make a more vanilla android feel – Will be functioning on v2)
Re Sense option added (Want it back? here you go – Will function on v2)
reboot option added (No longer reboots after root option. remember to use this before exiting script)
wireless tether app updated (hopefully fixes the issues some people were having)

HTC Super Tool is quite a complex utility, so even if it looks simple to click here and there, errors and mistakes may happen, and usual disclaimers apply.

The post HTC Super Tool Roots And Unlocks Most HTC Devices appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Motorola officially announced that  their Droid Bionic would see an upgrade to Android 4.0 in the coming months, however some users may get the taste of Ice Cream Sandwich on their devices right now.

Alpha release of a custom CyanogenMod9 port named Ics4Bionic has found its way to Droid masses at the Droid Forums. Features of this ICS port include:

What works:
Graphics working smooth now
ADB is working so we can track the rest
Touchscreen
Capacitive buttons
Charging indicator
BlueTooth
Both SD Cards
Built-in Screenshot
Reboot menu
Phone and SMS works
GPS fully functional
Audio fully working
1x data now working
NOTE: you may have to dial *#*#4636#*#* (or use Phone Info from the market) and toggle data mode between modes. For me toggling to GSM or WCDMA and then back to CDMA only usually does it. Once you see the status change to unknown leave it there it takes up to a minute to connect.

Not working:
3G/4G data….still sorting it out
USB support is still in progress sometimes it will mount in windows
Camera

Usual caveats and disclaimers apply to all brave souls that may want to switch to ICS ahead of the crowd — even without working 3G or 4G data, and with non-working camera. Then, the procedure is rather convoluted and based on use of a special SafeStrap bootstrapping utility for the Bionic.

The post Motorola Droid Bionic Gets Custom ICS Port (CM9) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It was an early Ice Cream Sandwich build demoed at Liliputing couple of days ago.

Since then, the development efforts were concentrated on elimination of serious flaws of this ‘pre-alpha’ build of ICS by JackpotClavin:

– SD card was not mounting, and many apps that require presence of it might not work properly, or weren’t install at all;

– video was not working;

– sound was not working, most of the time

– micro-freezes of UI here and there, force-closures of apps.

Update for JackpotClavin’s pre-alpha ICS build was released by XDA-Developers member bl1nkk that addresses some of these bugs and problems:

Workarounds/Fixes:
Landscape support in the launcher: Use Trebuchet to enable landscape support in the launcher. Nebkat is working on this almost every day, check the thread from time to time for even more changes. It’s also the CM9 launcher if you didn’t know yet.

It has a menu button in the drawer.
Trebuchet settings → General → Auto-rotate screen
And landscape mode should work.

SDCard mounting: push /system/bin/vold from CM7 to your device and set its permissions to 777.
I uploaded it for you right here.
MD5: f2ba34b9e0a18a8621abd6b82fbe334e

Rom, including the fixes above: XperiaPlayer packaged all fixes in a flashable zip right here. It’s a complete ROM, not just a patch. If you do a clean flash, use this one!
MD5: 81fb293c32016f8ca3c09df3e9612d8d

Whenever you feel like you’d want to experiment with your Kindle Fire, or just out of curiosity, you can try it:

ROM: tryforsdcard.zip | 821a44ed5cf44f6be1110da868de9ddd
Google Apps Addon: gapps_ics_4.0.3_v8.koush.zip | fcb89b851b1d6abb202c2a63586d829b

Root & Superuser: This rom is rooted already, just install Superuser from the market or flash this in TWRP.
MD5: a5d14dc42323a61caf71549a885af8c3

As of now, the update doesn’t offer all the fixes, plus more bugs and glitches are discovered

Just don’t forget to install TWRP, a customized Kindle Fire recovery utility, before your experiments with this ICS build. BradLinder of Liliputing has also another video that can help you to install the pre-alpha ICS build:

There’s also a detailed instruction published at Liliputing, so the process of transforming Kindle Fire into Ice Cream Sandwich tablet can be accomplished much easier than it may sound out of the explanations here.

The ICS on Kindle Fire project goes in parallel with previous efforts of g1011999 on building ICS.

The post Kindle Fire Runs Ice Cream Sandwich appeared first on Mobile Magazine.