I am the happy owner of an Android phone. I love it. But what I love even more, is rolling some sweet Python on my precious.

In case you have a vanilla phone like I do, you will need to follow these steps:

download and install the Android SDK for your platform

add the SDK tools to your system path, for instance on Windows run this in a shell:

> set PATH=%PATH%;path_to_android_sdk\tools

activate USB debugging on your phone ( Parameters > Applications > Development > USB Debugging )

) setup your system to detect your device as explained here (on Windows, it means installing the usb driver from the SDK)

check that your phone is detected correctly by running adb get-state (if everything is ok, the result should be ‘device’)

check out the Android Scripting Environment svn repository on your computer (see this page)

Your system is almost configured, let’s install the necessary applications on the phone:

install the Android Scripting Environment on your phone

(optionally) install the Text-to-Speech library (by Charles Chen) on your phone if you want to use it in your scripts, via the Android Market

run ASE on your phone, type menu and start a Python shell, you will notice a line like ‘export AP_PORT = “49508”‘.

setup port forwarding on your system with the value you just noted:

> set AP_PORT=49508 > adb forward tcp:%AP_PORT% tcp:%AP_PORT%

go to the ASE directory on your computer containing the android.py module

> cd path_to_ASE\python\ase

run your favorite Python 2.6 interpreter and enjoy the magic:

> python Python 2.6 (r26:66721, Oct 2 2008, 11:35:03) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import android >>> droid = android.Android() # now your phone is ready to acknowledge your awesomeness >>> droid.speak('hello, my master') {u'result': None, u'id': 2, u'error': None} # or alternatively, if you don't have the TTS library installed: >>> droid.makeToast('hello, my master') {u'result': None, u'id': 1, u'error': None}

Now you have all the information you need to start exploring the API and roll more interesting examples.