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Well, I was having trouble with random restarts and was curious to know if there was a log of errors... There is, and you can get it be installing Android SDK and jumping through other various hoops.

Now that I have installed Android SDK and I can apparently connect to/interact with my phone's memory by way Android SDK, what else can I learn/pry into? I can pull the logcat.txt off the phone, what else can I look at?

My phone is a Droid, so I don't know if its unrootable status comes into play in this case.

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 Added some tags. – Chahk Nov 23 at 15:55

3 Answers

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You can also:

  • Install and uninstall apps straight from command prompt ("adb install" and "adb uninstall") without having to copy APKs to your SD Card first.
  • Access to the Linux shell ("adb shell") from which you can issue various supported Linux commands.
  • Browse the phone's file system ("adb shell ls").
  • Copy files back and forth to your SD Card without having to mount it on your PC ("adb pull" and "adb push" commands)
  • Examine sqlite3 databases on your device ("adb shell sqlite3")
  • SDK also installs Android Emulator that allows you to run a virtual Android device on your PC. Developers usually use it for testing, but it's also simply fun to play around with.

The fact that Droid has not been rooted yet only means that you will not have access to protected areas of the phone, and every command you issue will run with limited access rights. For example, you will not be able to copy anything to the /system directories. Most of the shell commands that alter the state of the phone will also not function and complain of insufficient privileges.

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You can use the Android SDK to take screenshots, which is apparently the only safe way of doing a screen capture without rooting. The procedure is explained in this post: How to take Android Screenshots.

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There are a plethora of things that you can do with the SDK and your phone by using the ADB (Android Debug Bridge).

This includes looking at logs that any application on your phone may be reporting by using logcat.

See the ADB page on the developer guide for details.

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