Tech Mania

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 11:30 AM PST

The growing trend of Android smartphones has taken the smartphone industry into a battle so competent that manufactures are dishing out new devices by the second. A large population of the smartphone genre is of those who are new to it, attracted by the promising features this platform has to offer. This article will therefore focus on helping those users who are new to the Android platform and are intrigued by concepts like rooting, flashing Custom ROMS, etc.

The first basic stuff to get started on the android platform after buying an Android device would be to install the Android SDK, which facilitates the following :

installing apps without having to copy them to the SD card
install Custom Recovery
backup/restore the OS along with all the important data
install custom ROMs
reinstall the original firmware
explore your device inside out!

To get started, there are a few basic requirements/downloads to be done:

JDK (Java Development Kit) – Download here : Windows 32bit , Windows 64bit
JRE (Java Runtime Environment) – Download here : Windows 32bit , Windows 64bit
Android SDK installer – Download here : SDK Installer

So after all the downloads are done, you’re good to go.

First of all install the JDK, then the JRE and then the SDK Installer. Make sure that while installing the android sdk, the installation directory should be the root of a partition i.e. it should be in the following form : C:\android-sdk-windows , where you should replace the letter C with the letter you have assigned to the partition that you want to install it in.

Now that the Android-SDK is installed, goto the installation directory and start the SDK Manafer. You need to add the components of the Android SDK to your installation. Before that I’d like to inform you that you can save time if you download only whats necessary. If you are on Android 2.1 then you should download the 2.1 sdk , for 2.2 the 2.2 sdk and so on. You do not need to have all the version for this thing to work. Just your version would do. So to start adding components, I’d recommend you Read this

After installing the desired components, you need to do perform some simple steps in order to use the adb terminal just like the cmd terminal for Windows.

For that purpose, here are the steps to be followed :

Right click My Computer, select Properties , click Advanced System Settings. (Windows XP users, Right click My computer and just click Properties and select the Advanced Tab)
Click on Environment Variables, in the System Variables box, scroll down to the variable name “Path” and double click to edit it
It would read something like ” %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\“.
Here you need to add a semicolon ( ; ) and add the path of the tools folder in android-sdk-windows.
It should finally be like this ” %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\android-sdk-windows\tools” where C:\ should be replaced by the letter of the drive in which you have installed your Android SDK.
Click OK wherever asked and then restart your computer.
Now open a command prompt window and type adb and hit enter. If a terminal window is displayed, you’ve done it all right.
If it gives some error message, read the article carefully and see what you have messed up with.

Now if you want to install apps in one click, all you need to do is download the .apk file of your application and set the open with option to this batch file which you can download here

The other utilities like installing Custom Recovery and Custom ROMs will be covered in the next article.

If you face any problems with the installation, feel free to let us know via comments. I hope this article helped you!

Happy Tweaking!

How to install Android SDK is a post from: Tech Mania