I use an dumbphone, not a smartphone for all my mobile phone tasks and never really used Android before. Well, because I already waste enough time on the interwebs...

Long story short, I was given an already rooted ZTE blade Gen1, upgraded it to the last official Cyanogenmod version, put the Torque apk on there (appstore requires google account, I don't want one) and intalled it. Torque connects and detects the wifi obd adapter once set up. Time to connect it to my ECU...

Completely new to Android, the first things figured out so far are:

• To get into different modes (recovery,  fastboot, TPT, ...) hold down key combinations on power up (as seen on some IBM Thinkpads)
• It is possible to tinker with the phone by adb (android debug, included in SDK/IDE download)
• There is a bootloader plus recovery, os, user data and cache partition
• Most custom ROMs (OS images) don't contain Google Apps (appstore etc) out of licence reasons. It is necessary to get "GApps" seperately and install it on top of the ROM.
• For different phones/manufacturers the way to get an own recovery (e.g. Clockworkmod) is different (e.g. you have to unlock the bootloader first (calc unlock code from IMEI etc), or just boot from an SD-card with "special" boot files on it
  
  • For ZTE blade, depending on the Gen(eration), which can be found out by the "Blade Checker" app, a "TPT" (total phone transfer) is necessary. A TPT consists of a bunch of files that overwrite almost everything (repartitions the flash, writes bootloader, recovery, baseband (?) and sometimes android/os partition). For ZTE blade, different TPTs are available, for different Gen(erations), different flash layouts and different recoverys. 
• Flashing Android/Google Apps is more or less the same with Clockworkmod:
  
  • wipe
  • install Android from zip (zip put on SD card)
  • install Gapps from zip (zip put on SD card)
  • restart

The following link sums up the procedure pretty well: http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Tips-Advice/Want-to-root-your-Orange-San-Francisco-ZTE-Blade-Gen-1/td-p/3196075

Files for the phone: http://www.mediafire.com/?k0u19ssphidvo

http://www.amphoras.co.uk/downloads/blade-tpts

Files I used:

Gen1-to-Gen2-TPT-v7.zip size:16.02mb md5:c10cd48bbfb8e2c16384ebb49e06eb5c partitions: 2mb cache, 160mb system, 294mb data

latest Cyanogenmod nightly: http://download.cyanogenmod.com/?device=blade

GApps: http://goo.im/gapps/gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip