[T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide] Blue6IX:
You're honestly in the best place to start. XDA is home to some...thinking about it i'd say most... of the people online across all the random messageboards, news postings and whatnot who are all into the same thing and realize that by sharing what we know we can all work on bits and pieces of the larger picture.

Ever since I found XDA, I realized this was the place I was always looking for on the internet. Some of the most learned and skilled people i've met across the internet are scattered around these forums, and I found their works here.

The best advice to anyone new coming to XDA or trying to learn here, specifically, is that since so many people share so much, it's absolutely overwhelming the first time you wander around the XDA forums.

Use the search feature, as everyone rightly suggests, but the one thing that people never get right is managing their excitement.

You're home, you found the place where there are so many answers to and relating to your question, you get giddy. I know I did.

Resist the urge to just dive in and start asking questions. Put away your need to have the answer right now - I know it's just your nature, it's the tendency of people...any people...to just act like that. It's how we've progressed as a species, the aggresive need to know, solve, conquer...right this second.

That's wrong. When I found XDA, I browsed here for a while...sometimes for specific answers, other times just randomly through all the forums looking at...well...whatever random stuff I could find.

The thing about search is, it's great if you want a specific answer, because you keep finding more keywords and phrases to track down that will eventually lead you to the information you seek.

If you can't find the answer here at XDA, your quest to find it on your own without asking will turn up the people you could ask to help figure it out - something you miss just asking for it or exclusively using search.

Basically, just don't be too eager. The boards are way too big, populated by people that want to share what they know, so the amount of information here is too much to get through in one sitting. The first time I found this place I didn't leave my keyboard for more then a few minutes for almost 6 days.

I registered because I finally had something that I could share. My first device was the Nook Color, and by the time I got one the forums were jumping and so many choices for what you could do and how to do it were there ... it was my first android device and development was progressing so fast I couldn't keep up with learning it all from the ground up.

I stopped and focused on some topic I could expand on or in some way contribute, and it ended up being pretty in depth testing on MicroSD cards. I had a handful laying around, and running the Nook Color from the memory card instead of the internal memory will pass or fail depending on the memory card...and the one you instinctively want is wrong.

So, use the search function before posting something specific, don't forget to browse sometimes if you have some free time, it's like treasure hunting.

When I realized what this device ( MT4GS ) was capable of after coming to the MT4GS forums here to research if I really did want it or not...the TV-OUT thread was my seller. I am spellbound by this device, there's nothing else like it on the market at the moment.

I just couldn't miss out on playing with what I think will be the prototype model of what all phones will strive to do as technologies get assimilated across phones and carriers.

Being able to walk up to a TV and use the phone as not only an interactive game controller, but the console itself as well - with the TV bit being done so well that it's something you don't even have to think about other then if you want to or not. No special set up, just plug and play. I'm a fan.

But you know what? It's an unlisted feature that's rumored/probably true/unfinished in the phone.

( haven't looked into this in a while, maybe untrue but I found out about it here at XDA and remember reading that somewhere...every T-mobile rep i've seen has this phone, I talk to every one, and not a single one of them knew they could plug their device into a TV, let alone have some intense gaming experiences.

Not bad for something that's not mentioned - this should have been the selling point for the phone.

Thing is, without XDA, I wouldn't know how to do a fraction of what I know how to do with Android. Just sifting through everything here has taught me so much, but you have to have the patience to sit and take your time learning. Otherwise, even if you pull it off, six months from now you'll have to probably start over tracking down what you read before to do it again.

The more detailed and accurate the information that everyone posts, the more we all learn together.

Know what the big secret is, that I try to tell everyone?

The best way to cement the knowledge you've gained into your brain is to try to teach it to someone else. They'll think of questions you might never, approach from different perspectives with different tactics, and challenge you to know it well enough to be able to answer something you haven't thought about before on the spot.

I've been studying my whole life to be a teacher when I get older and can't hack physical stuff anymore, and try to freely teach anyone anything I know. The more I educate others, the more they educate me, and the more instinctively I know whatever we were working on.

Let me reiterate, again from a different perspective with different reasoning, the only way you learn something is to have the patience to do it - but the same goes for teaching. You have to have the patience to sit there and let the student get the answer, and the restraint to not give it to them and make them work for it so they remember it longer.

Analogies are king in getting through to people, but to be able to use analogies effectively for random people you have to be at least semi-educated on, well, everything.

Take a job in a retail store, any local big box popular electronics store. Sell computers, smart phones, or things like that. Then try to relate how the computer works to everyone you explain it to. Once you know some subject they are familiar with that you know, you can compare like functions to give them understandings.

Do yourself a favor - the next time you go to sit down in front of a television, pick up a book instead. (bonus points if you also grab a thesaurus)

Vocabulary and the contents of the thesaurus are the primary tools you need to use well for search. Forget all the ways a search engine works for you and remember that you need to not only search what you're looking for, but all the other ways of saying or describing what you want.

If you search fire, you get one set of results. What about ember, blaze, smolder, incinerate, char, smoke, fuel, tinder...etc...

If you have to look up all those synonyms every time you want to search for something, not only does it take longer (impatience again) but you are less likely to actually do it because of all the extra steps you have to take.

Phrase your posts well, try to punctualize, capitalize, and generally make what you're saying presentable. It takes me longer to decipher some internet shorthand, because they aren't acronyms I study. It hurts me on messageboards, but helps keep my vocabulary instinctively clean elsewhere.

On that turn, i'm more likely to read and/or respond to someone who actually took enough time to write their post, instead of just scratching out the first string of letters that looked close to some resemblance of the words they were trying to write.

( I know that's extreme, but that's another teaching tool, exploring extremes and understanding boundaries and capability - the foundation for your ability to reason )

So, you caught me at a time where i'm writing a curriculum for learning how to learn, techniques and approaches and such for someone I am going to start teaching android to. As much as it seems like i'm rambling here, all my postings tonight have been sprinkled with little methods or things to do to increase your speed, accuracy and ability to learn itself because that's what i'm working on right this minute.

It's been a long, hard, physical week at work. While rewarding and I feel great about what i've done, my body is not so happy at the moment. Trying to get into a new project with my MT4GS tonight is probably pushing it, so instead i'm just sitting here writing up what i've learned about learning, typing to me is very relaxing and keeps me active in spirit while mostly resting in the physical sense.

This is why they say knowledge is power, because you have to build knowledge on other knowledge. The more you understand and exploit the learning process to work for you, consciously and directly, the more natural and fluid it becomes.

If you learn what you need to learn to learn better (say that 3 times fast) you will become more efficient - and that's part of why we all get together here to do this stuff to our phones.

It's challenging, it's fun, it's a never-ending exercise in discovering cool new things or flat out creating brand new ideas of your own.

Part of what's been feeding my excitement with this phone, besides it's indisputable awesomeness, is the fact that it's new and there's an air of freshness to all the time being put into it. It's not like my last device where I showed up and found all the answers, this time I get to find and share some of them.

But that's the constant state of learning, the browsing all over XDA, setting up specific projects (tonight i'll learn how to make a livewallpaper, etc...) and creating manageable, short term goals along the road to a bigger destination.

The destination is reached much more interestingly with others, and when we all get there it's one big party together. This goal is made easier and sooner the more people that play.

Another thing is, I try to share what I post as thoroughly and accurately as possible. 2 Great reasons to take an extra minute and check something, or look it up again to make sure that it's right.

1-Someone else can build off your solid base, and spend less time learning what you were trying to convey

2-If i'm wrong, someone will speak up. There are so many learned people here, someone will see what I did wrong and if not why, someone else can probably explain it or get us started on finding out why.

So please, don't hesitate to correct me on something if you know i'm wrong. we all benefit from it, and is part of the motivation to be as thorough as I try to be.

Hope that the length of this post is justified by the content I tried to convey, you caught me in a typing mood with an open-ended question.