ClockworkMod Recovery is a utility that can be used on Android devices to backup, restore, or wipe data on your phone or tablet, and to flash new software. For instance you need a custom recovery tool like ClockworkMod to install CyanogenMod or MIUI versions of Android.

Up until now ClockworkMod has relied on the volume, power, and home buttons on most devices for navigation, since it doesn’t include touchscreen support. That’s made the popular utility difficult to use on devices that don’t have all of those buttons, including the Amazon Kindle Fire. That’s one of the reasons the touch-based TWRP 2.0 recovery software has proven popular with Kindle Fire users.

But ClockworkMod developer Koushik Dutta is showing off a new version of his utility that will work with touchscreens. This will allow ClockworkMod Recovery to work on the Kindle Fire, and it will also allow users to navigate through various menus more quickly even on devices that do have volume, home, and power buttons.

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Google has updated the Music Manager for its cloud-based music service. While you could previously use the manager to upload as many as 20,000 songs to Google Music or to download tracks you’d purchased from the service — now you can use it to download the songs you’ve uploaded.

In other words, you can use Google Music to backup your music library, stream it to any computer with a web browser or to your Android phone or tablet, and download your music to a PC.

So you can create a backup of your music collection using Google Music and re-download it if your hard drive crashes, you laptop is stolen, or you buy a new PC.

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to download just a few songs at a time using the music manager. What happens when you click the “Download my library” button is that Google asks you what folder you’d like to store your music in, and then is starts to download all of your songs.

But you can download individual tracks or albums from the Google Music website.

This weekend the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team released tools to jailbreak the iPhone 4s and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1. And it turns out an awful lot of people were waiting to do just that.

Just three days after the jailbreak utilities were first released, the iPhone Dev Team reports that nearly half a million iPhone 4S devices have been jailbroken. The iPad 2 numbers are a little funkier, with about 300,000 new iPad 2 jailbreaks and around 150,000 people who had jailbroken their iPads while running iOS 4.x now upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and jailbreaking again.

The stats are compiled from the number of new devices pinging the server for the Cydia store for jailbroken devices. Cydia is installed when you jailbreak your iDevice.

In addition to enabling support for apps that aren’t available from the App Store, jailbreaking allows you to access hidden files and settings on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and make changes to the look and feel of the operating system.

Up until recently it was easy to jailbreak an iPad 1, iPhone 4, or earlier devices including all iPod touch models. But the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 both have new hardware that had proven more difficult to crack… until now.

A day after the first tools for jailbreaking an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S were released for Mac users, the iPhone Dev Team has updated their utility to work with Windows.

The process is a bit more involved since it relies on a command-line utility that walks you through the process one step at a time for debugging purposes. But if you don’t want to wait for the Windows version of the tools to get a graphical user interface, now you don’t have to.

Update: Chronic Dev Team has also released an easier-to-use program for Windows as well as a Linux utility for jailbreaking an iPhone 4S or iPad 2.

Just download the latest CLI from the bottom of the official post at the iPhone Dev Team Blog, unzip it to a folder on your computer, open a command prompt and type “cinject -i payloads/jailbreak.mobileconfig” (without quotes) to get started.

You can also find a step-by-step walkthrough at FSM or more information at iPhone hacker Musclenerd’s website.

Chronic Dev Team has released a utility that can jailbreak the iPad 2 or iPhone 4S. It’s the first jailbreak utility available for devices with Apple’s dual-core A5 processor. Up until now all jailbreaking tools only worked on phones or tablets with the A4 processor or earlier chips.

The new tool is called GreenPois0n Absinthe and you can download it from the GreenPois0n website. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The iPhone Dev Team also has also released a command line-based jailbreaking tool soon which walks you through the process one step at a time. It works on Mac or Windows.

This should help identify any remaining problem spots. Eventually the latest jailbreak tools will be incorporated in the next version of the popular redsn0w utility for jailbreaking iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad models.

Jailbreaking an iOS device allows users to install apps that aren’t available in the App Store including software which can change the boot logo, notification system, multitasking tray, or make other system-level changes to the operating system. It will also probably void your warranty.

Absinthe performs an “untethered” jailbreak, which means you can reboot your phone or tablet without having to connect it to a computer via a USB cable.

Android developer Koushik Dutta has proposed the creation of a CyanogenMod App Store. It would sort of be like Cydia for Android: a place where users can download apps for rooted Android devices or apps that simply aren’t allowed in the Google Android Market for one reason or another.

Google’s official app store isn’t nearly as restrictive as Apple’s, but apps are regularly pulled from the Android Market for violating Google’s rules – or for running afoul of wireless carriers.

For instance, there are very few video game console emulators left in the Android Market. And Koushik Dutta’s own app for tethering an Android phone to a computer to share a wireless internet connection was recently pulled at AT&T’s request.

While the app store would be named for the popular CyanogenMod open-source Android operating system, it would be available for any custom ROM developers to include in their software. The idea is that it would provide a place for developers to upload free and paid apps which aren’t available in the Android Market — and with over a million active CyangoenMod users, those developers would have a pretty large potential customer base on day one

The app store isn’t a done deal yet, but Koush has already posted a picture of the upload page he’s working on to his Google+ page.

Some of the top iOS hackers have announced that the great white whale of jailbreaking is about to go down: they’ve successfully jailbroken both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Update: The Chronic Dev Team has released GreenPois0n Absinthe, which you can now use to jailbreak the iPhone 4S or iPad 2. 

Apple’s two latest iOS devices use the dual core Apple A5 processor and aren’t vulnerable to the same tools used to jailbreak earlier devices — but a new exploit has been discovered that will jailbreak those devices.

Hacker pod2g and the folks at the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team are working out the last few bugs, but they each plan to release tools that will allow users to perform an untethered jailbreak on the iPhone 4S or iPad 2 soon.

Jailbreaking an iOS device allows you to install third party apps that aren’t available from the App Store or make other changes to the look and feel of the device by accessing files and settings that are normally hidden from end users.

This will be an untethered jailbreak, which means you’ll be able to reboot your device without connecting it to a computer with a USB cable.

Chronic Dev will release a tool with a graphical user interface which you can run on a PC or Mac to jailbreak the devices. The iPhone Dev Team will eventually incorporate the ability to jailbreak devices with A5 chips into its popular redsn0w jailbreak utility, but first iPhone Dev will release a command-line utility that walks you through the process one step at a time. This will help diagnose any problems users are having.

The jailbreak will work on iPad 2 models running iOS 5.0.1 and iPhone 4S devices running iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1. If you’re hoping to carrier unlock an iPhone 4S you should stick with iOS 5.0.

The Motorola Droid was one of the first really popular Android smartphones. But at this point the 2009 era device is considered pretty ancient. Motorola has no plans to update the Droid to Google Android 4.0, and even the hackers at CyanogenMod have announced the plan to drop support for the aging smartphone when CyanogenMod 9 (based on Android 4.0) is released to the public.

But there’s always someone who won’t take no for an answer — and this time it’s xda-developers forum member kabaldan. He’s ported an early build of CyanogenMod 9 to run on the original Motorola Droid.

Some features don’t work. For instance there’s no support for hardware accelerated video and the camera doesn’t function. Because the Droid doesn’t have as much internal storage space as most modern Android phones, kabaldan’s software also carves up the storage in interesting ways and makes use of an sd card if it’s properly partitioned and formatted.

The boot animation is also disabled because it uses enough RAM to cause problems on the Droid.

If that’s not enough to scare you off, you can find download links for CyanogenMod 9 RC0 and a working version of gApps at the xda-developers forum.

via xda-developers