Android related projects

When I have a new Linux device in my hands, I love running NBench to see the raw CPU power. So I ported the NBench to Android, and you can find it in the Android Market.

The benchmark was designed to expose the capabilities of a system's CPU, FPU, memory system, and C compiler performance. The results can be published and seen on this web site: http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html (archived results here )

The results on my Motorola Dext @528Mhz, show that it has the power of a good old Pentium II @300Mhz.

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          123.49  :       3.17  :       1.04
STRING SORT         :          5.4545  :       2.44  :       0.38
BITFIELD            :      3.2958e+07  :       5.65  :       1.18
FP EMULATION        :          12.774  :       6.13  :       1.41
FOURIER             :          209.47  :       0.24  :       0.13
ASSIGNMENT          :          1.4236  :       5.42  :       1.41
IDEA                :          433.54  :       6.63  :       1.97
HUFFMAN             :           203.7  :       5.65  :       1.80
NEURAL NET          :         0.27756  :       0.45  :       0.19
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          8.1793  :       0.42  :       0.31
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.746
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.356
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 2 (v6l)
L2 Cache            : 0
OS                  : Linux version 2.6.27
C compiler          : arm-eabi-gcc (GCC) 4.4.0
libc                : Android Bionic libc
MEMORY INDEX        : 0.855
INTEGER INDEX       : 1.512
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.197
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

You'll find the source code under the Apache License here: http://drolez.git.sourceforge.net/

If you have results (or bug reports) for the Nexus or Droid, please post them here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/drolez/forums/forum/1123525

Now that we have a benchmark that runs on smartphones and PCs, we can make some interesting comparisons. You'll see on the graph below, that newer devices based on the new ARM Cortex A8 architecture (Droid and Nexus one), are getting really powerful. The Nexus One OC to 1.11GHz can be compared to a Pentium III at 1GHz. The floating point performance is still low, but with latest Android NDKs, Arm v7 optimization is available. With those optimizations, available in Android NBench v1.0 and newer, FP performance is more than doubled.

Transfering the contacts from a Nokia phone to Android cannot be done via bluetooth because there's no OBEX client for Android. Sad but true... The Android "Bluetooth File Transfer" program can emulate an OBEX client but you 1st need to root your phone !

So:

1. I 1st exported the Nokia contacts to a VCard file using a nice J2ME program from http://users.tpg.com.au/johnd/nokia-backup.html
2. Then I tried to import that file using VCardIO on the Dext, but I begun to have Google Contacts sync problems. I think that VCardIO corrupted the Contacts DB.
3. Finally, the solution was to remove all contacts on the Dext and to import the VCard export, via Google Mail. Gmail has a better Vcard parsing and you won't get corrupted entries.

For importing Zaurus data, I used the zdbat utility described in my Zaurus page. I exported the memos and address book as CSV by running on the Zaurus:

zdbat address -r -c utf8 >addr.csv
zdbat memo -r -c utf8 >memo.csv

For the memo data, I did a simple cut'n paste to my Dext, and for the address book, I converted the CSV to VCard using this simple script, and then imported the contacts in Gmail. The script is very basic, and you may have to edit it to suit your needs.

I also used Keyring on my Zaurus, and I only did a XML export and then cut'n pasted the export to Keepassdroid.

• Fast PDF reader based on xpdf => I started contributing on "APV", the best PDF viewer for Android !
• Quick/Temporary bookmarks => Project started: "TempBookmark"
• Port PalmOS AstroInfo to Android
• XMame port
• Pose PalmOS emulator port (yes, there are many good PalmOS apps !)
• HTTP proxy over Bluetooth/SPP/PPP, to be able to connect to a desktop computer over bluetooth
• Write a simple user-space NFS for Android

(I switch to French since that's only for French Dext users).

Cette mise à jour est destinée seulement aux possesseurs de Motorola Dext en France, et ayant déjà Rooté leur Dext avec une Rom 1.1.36 et Amon_RA 1.5.2 ! Flasher une rom peut être dangereux, si vous cassez votre Dext je décline toute responsabilité !

Dernière version: 1.3.20.3. Modifications: suppression de BlurUpdater.apk. Full Changelog

La base est une version 1.3.20 officielle, avec su, busybox, bash, et sans Shazam, et Orange maps.

Voici les images 1.3.20 avec ou sans la mise a jour de la "radio": Cliquez ici

La mise a jour se fait comme avec n'importe quelle autre update Dext avec Amon_RA. Deux updates sont disponibles:

• La mise à jour normale, avec "radio", est un peu plus longue et il n'est pas possible de revenir en arrière (avec une version radio plus ancienne).
• La mise à jour sans "radio" (-noradio), est conseillée si vous avez déjà upgrade la radio en version "76XXC-....5025-SDCBALUM" (voir "Version de bande de base" dans les préférences).

Afin de faciliter les contributions, les sources qui ont permis de construire cette update sont sur Sourceforge. Passez par les forums Sourceforge pour vos questions, et par le tracker pour les bugs ou demandes d'améliorations: