So you want to have some more control over your android phone? Sure you do. For any, just slightly above userlevel stuff you might want to do with it, you require the tools ADB (the Android Developer Bridge) and Fastboot (Fast boot). Since I am still quite ignorant to all of this, I decided to write a small reminder blagpost for myself on how to get those tools. Oh yea, this is all on Windows. Linux users have package managers and stuff like this just works. You will need the Java Development Kit. After you got that, you need to get the Android SDK Tools. Download "SDK Tools Only". Once you have installed it, open the SDK Manager. It will want to install a lot of stuff, but unless you actually want to do development, you might not even have to install anything. I installed the following only: * Android SDK Tools * Android SDK Platform-tools * Google USB Drivers Assuming that %GSDK% is the path where you installed the SDK tools, you will find the applications adb.exe and fastboot.exe in

%GSDK%\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools

You might want to add that to your path, or not. Fun fact. If you use cygwin, you can call adb shell from a cygwin terminal and then invoke bash on the phone, and the cygwin terminal will interpret all the color codes sent back from the phone's bash correctly, so you can have a really comfortable shell open on your phone: