HTC Dream

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HTC Dream HTC Dream
Slogan Amazing Possibilities. Exceptional Experiences.
Manufacturer HTC
Carrier T-Mobile
Available October 22, 2008 (US)
Screen 3.2 in (81 mm) HVGA (480×320) (180 ppi) 65K color capacitive touchscreen
Camera 3.2 megapixel with auto focus
Operating system Android 1.5[1][2]
Input Capacitive touchscreen, sliding QWERTY Keyboard, Trackball
CPU Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 @ 528MHz
Default ringtone G1 Mixtape
Memory 192 MB DDR SDRAM 256 MB Flash
Memory card microSD
Networks Quad band GSM / GPRS / EDGE: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Dual band UMTS / HSDPA / HSUPA: UMTS 1700 / 2100 (US/Europe) (7.2/2 Mbit/s)
Connectivity Bluetooth 2.0, IEEE 802.11 b/g, ExtUSB
Battery 1150 mAh
Physical size 117.7 mm x 55.7 mm x 17.1 mm (4.60 in x 2.16 in x 0.62 in)
Weight 158g w/ battery
Series A Series
Successor HTC Magic

The HTC Dream (also marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US) is an Internet-enabled 3G smartphone with an operating system designed by Google and hardware designed by HTC. It was the first phone to the market that uses the Android mobile device platform.[3] The phone is part of an open standards effort of the Open Handset Alliance.[4]

It was released in the US on 22 October 2008; in the UK on 30 October 2008;[5] and became available in other European countries including Austria, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic in early 2009.[6] It was released in Germany in February 2009 with a QWERTZ keyboard.[7] On 10 March 2009, it became available in Poland as Era G1 under a local mobile brand affiliated with T-Mobile.[8]

In the US, it is priced starting at $149.99 for new and existing T-Mobile customers if purchased with a two-year T-Mobile voice and data plan, and $399 without a contract.[9] Contrary to claims made by T-Mobile representatives, the handset does not need the data plan to work; however, the Access Point Name (APN) settings need to be changed to make the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS-Picture Messages) work.[10] The Dream comes in black, bronze (except in the UK), or white.[11]

On 23 April 2009, T-Mobile USA announced it had sold one million G1s since the device's launch.[12]

On 5 February 2009, the phone was released through Optus in Australia, as the HTC Dream.[13] On 21 February 2009, Singapore became the first country in Asia to introduce the phone. It was sold by SingTel between $25 – $159 under various contracts.[14] [15] Telefónica also launched a version of the phone in Spain on 20 April 2009[16][17] with slightly modified control buttons.[18]

On June 2nd, 2009 it was released through Rogers Wireless in Canada as the HTC Dream. This edition of the HTC Dream includes the UMTS 850 / 1900 bands for use on Rogers' 3G network. [19]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Hardware
* 2 Software
o 2.1 Google Maps
o 2.2 Location information
o 2.3 Viewing and editing text
o 2.4 Clipboard
o 2.5 Navigation within a large webpage
* 3 Native code
* 4 Developer edition
* 5 Homebrew
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
* 8 See also
* 9 External links

[edit] Hardware

* Display: 3.2 in (8.1 cm) TFT-LCD flat glass touch-sensitive HVGA screen with 480 X 320 pixel resolution. The capacitive touchscreen makes it impossible to use a standard stylus. The display switches from portrait to landscape mode when the keyboard is opened. Users can interact to bring up or move content with a finger touch, tapping or touch-drag motion.[20] The touchscreen hardware is capable of multitouch gestures[21], but Android does not currently support it.
* CPU: The MSM7201A is an ARM-based, dual-core CPU/GPU from Qualcomm and contains many built-in features, including 3G and a GPU capable of up to 4 million triangles/sec. It has hardware acceleration for Java,[22] but this does not accelerate execution of Android applications, as they are targeted to the Dalvik VM, not the Java VM.
* Keyboard: The HTC Dream has a sliding full 5 row QWERTY keyboard. It also comes with a set of 6 navigation buttons:
o phone (green, black in UK) – make outbound calls, receive incoming calls, or open the dialer.
o home (black) – displays home screen with shortcut icons for some applications and a drawer containing all applications on the phone.
o trackball – navigate among items on the screen or scroll in text fields.
o back (black) – return to the previous screen.
o phone (red, black in UK) – end currently active call or put phone into sleep mode.
o menu (black) – display the contextual menu for the current screen.
o a touchscreen keyboard is available as of Android 1.5.
* Side controls: A pair of volume buttons is located on the left side of the phone, and a camera button on the right side.
* Audio: In place of a headphone jack, the Dream (like many HTC smartphones) has a mini-USB-compatible ExtUSB jack [23][24] that carries audio signals alongside the regular USB signals, and can be converted with a dongle (now shipped with the phone) to support any standard 3.5 mm headphone. The standard headset includes a clip-on microphone and call answer/hangup button. The Dream supports audio files in MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, MPEG4, WAV, MIDI, and Ogg formats.[25]
* Camera: The HTC Dream has a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus functionality.[26]
* Video: The Dream can play H.264, streaming, 3GPP, MPEG4, and 3GP files.[25] There is no light ("flash") for the camera in low light conditions. Video recording and uploading to YouTube is available as of Android 1.5. Recording resolution 352x288 H.263 3GP Mono sound @ 8KHz.
* Storage: The HTC Dream has a microSD card slot and comes with a 1GB memory card (2GB in the UK and Canada). It has been confirmed to work with capacities up to 16GB, and may work with even larger cards. [27] When the USB cable is connected to a computer, this computer can access the card without removing it from the HTC Dream. The phone can access media files arranged in folders, but the folders have to be created from the computer.
* Battery: The HTC Dream has a user-replaceable, 3.7V, 1150 mAh (4.25Whr) rechargeable lithium ion battery, which is advertised to offer up to 130 hours of standby power.
* Orientation and location: The HTC Dream provides an accelerometer for sensing movement and which way up it is. It also has a digital compass, giving it complete orientation data. The Dream includes a GPS receiver for fine-grained positioning, and can use cellular or wifi networks for coarse-grained positioning.
* Case: Three different colors are available: black, bronze, white.

[edit] Software

The HTC Dream runs the Android Operating System. Most Android software developers write their applications in Java, but because Android does not directly run Java bytecode, they first need to be compiled into a unique non-Java bytecode, Dalvik bytecode, before they can be executed on an Android-powered phone.

The Home screen allows the user to place icons for applications, contacts, and other items on three virtual desktops. It also supports widgets, but until version 1.5 of the operating system was released, third-party applications were not able to install their own widgets.[28] Since the release of Android 1.5, however, third-party widgets are enabled.

It comes with a web browser powered by the WebKit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari and Chrome.

Pre-installed software applications provide access to many Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Talk, and a YouTube video player.[25] In the United States, the carrier-subsidized firmware for the G1 also comes with an application for accessing the Amazon MP3 music store, which allows users to browse and legally purchase DRM-free songs; however, in developer firmwares this application is not included.[29]

Also included with the device is the Android Market application that allows users to download new software applications from third-party developers, as well as provide publicly-viewable ratings and comments.

[edit] Google Maps

The Google Maps application supports map, satellite, traffic, and street view. Street View uses the accelerometer and digital compass to align the view on the screen with the actual orientation of the phone. It also comes with Google latitude, a location based service that allows friends who also have Google maps to view your locale, add status updates, chat, etc. Google maps has recently been updated to provide a more robust search experience. Searching for a business would bring up the usual search criteria, as well as ratings, reviews, and if applicable, the website to the business. Another addition to the update includes the ability to receive routes for different methods of transportation including walking, and public transit. This update can be found in the Android market.

[edit] Location information

The HTC Dream offers two different sources of location information for applications such as Google Maps: a GPS receiver built-in to the chipset, and radio-tower location based on a database of mobile phone tower locations. In addition, the Dream includes a digital compass; it allows one to turn the phone showing the local map to orient it correctly (the map is not turned on the screen, North is always up).

[edit] Viewing and editing text

To open a sideloaded text file, additional software has to be acquired, for example the free ASTRO File Manager. Instead one can also store text in Gmail as draft message. One can modify a text while also preserving the old version by first copying the text (see below) to another draft message.

Documents in Google Docs can be viewed, but not edited. However, spreadsheets in Google Docs (including the texts in them) can be edited.[30][31]

[edit] Clipboard

A clipboard allows copying, cutting and pasting.

[edit] Navigation within a large webpage

For webpages a magnifying window provides simultaneous 2D-scrolling, thus allowing quick approximate access to any part of even a very long (or wide) webpage. However, this does not work in scrollable text in a subwindow, such as in the case of a long Gmail text.

[edit] Native code

Native code can be executed using the ADB debugger, which is run as a background daemon on the HTC Dream.[32] The shell will run with the user ID of the "shell" user rather than root. When the Dream was first released, it was quickly discovered that the telnet daemon on the phone is given a uid of 0 (root) when it runs, giving the end user complete access to the device. This security hole has since been fixed in build RC30 of Android and was pushed to all devices via an OTA update.[33] However, it is still possible to downgrade to the old firmware in order to exploit the bug and gain root access to the Dream.[34]

The Dream firmware can be updated by flashing from an image stored on the microSD card.[35] These images are cryptographically signed by either the phone manufacturer or network carrier.[36]

The Android Dev Phone 1 allows native code and custom kernels to be run without any special hacks.

Following the disclosure of a root exploit, Jay Freeman released details of how to run Android and ARM Debian Linux together on the Dream.[37]

[edit] Developer edition

On December 5, 2008, Google announced the Android Dev Phone 1, a hardware unlocked version of the HTC Dream. With this version, the user is not only able to use any GSM/UMTS carrier, but also has complete superuser access to the device which is not found in the retail version. The advantages to this version is that it gives full access to the internal files of the phone, in particular changing and re-flashing the bootloader and operating system.[38] This version also has pre-installed utilities to aid in the development of Android apps. This version is sold for US$399 and is only available to registered members of the Android community which is open to all developers for a US$25 fee.[39] Depending on the country, the additional shipping charges (which include tariff and tax) may amount to a substantial fraction of the base price; for example, shipping charges to United Kingdom are $128.25, to Germany are US$134.31 and to Poland US$162.

The phone comes pre-configured for access to T-Mobile's data networks worldwide. If a T-Mobile SIM card is not readily available then details of another operator's network must be entered before the initial setup of the phone can be completed. While prompted for a Google account details the APN settings can be accessed by pressing the Menu key. The existing T-Mobile's entries in the list should not be modified in any way. Instead, a new entry can be created by pressing the Menu key again and choosing Add. All the settings should remain at default values, except those listed in the table below. When the entry is complete it should be saved by pressing the Menu key and choosing Save. From there one can return to the initial setup by pressing the Back arrow key.
Name APN Username Password Port MMSC MMS Proxy MMS Port MNC
UK Networks
O2 PAYG payandgo.o2.co.uk vertigo password
O2 Contract mobile.o2.co.uk o2web password
Orange orangeinternet 9201 33
Rogers Wireless internet.com wapuser1 wap
Three Mobile (3) three.co.uk http://mms.um.three.co.uk:10021/mmsc mms.three.co.uk 8799 20
Vodafone internet web web

[edit] Homebrew

Upon the launch of the T-Mobile G1, one concern among developers was that limitations were present in its build of Android that blocked superuser access to the phone. However, a severe vulnerability was soon discovered in early versions of the firmware — everything typed into the phone's keyboard was being interpreted as commands in a root shell.[40] By using telnetd to exploit this, users could flash a modified image with root access. This process, dubbed "rooting" by the community,[41] allows users to gain superuser access and perform actions previously impossible without root access, such as installing custom builds of Android, running Debian[42], installing custom themes, and enabling ad-hoc Wi-Fi tethering. Although Google and T-Mobile were quick to patch this vulnerability with update RC30, a ROM from HTC was later leaked allowing users to downgrade to an older firmware with the bug.[43] The Android Dev Phone 1 comes with superuser access officially integrated into its firmware.[44]

Rooting also allows the use of modified images to run on the G1 through the original vulnerability. For example, a leaked HTC Magic (Android 1.5) OS was modified to run on the device. Before the official Android 1.5 build for the HTC Dream was released (which included these features), this enabled functionality such as video recording, stereo Bluetooth and an on-screen keyboard.