Droid Hype

Although the Nexus S has been available on the market now for over a year, it’s actually a bit confusing for first time users to unlock and root the device. Give it a try, do a search and try and find the right adb and fastboot drivers for Windows 7 64-bit. I’m willing to bet it’s not as easy as everyone claims it to be. For some reason, fastboot drivers give 64-bit users a world of trouble in terms of acquiring and installing.

Since I went back to using my Nexus S on T-Mobile, I decided to post a quick how-to on getting this done.

Download the following zips before beginning:

  Android ADB and Fastboot tools (13.2 MiB, 80 hits)
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  Nexus S 9020T Drivers and Touch Recovery (15.1 MiB, 14 hits)
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Since I have the I-9020T model for T-Mobile, this guide will support only that version. This most likely will not work for the I-9023 LCD version or the D720 (Sprint 4g version), however, it should work for the I-9020A (ATT version).

Let’s begin…

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Our Droid rooting guide has been posted! Here’s the direct link or just click the menu link up top.

We’re on a Launcher Pro kick over here since it’s such a great home replacement. One great option for LP is the ability to set a dock background. You can create anything that will fit the allocated space and load it up to match your theme. The above screenshot is from a quick mash up of a dock I found in this great LP custom dock forum thread.

It’s pretty easy to set it up, just follow these directions.

1. Save the downloaded dock image to your sdcard.
2. Open up LP preferences and go to Appearance Options.
3. Choose the dock background -> custom option.
4. Navigate to your downloaded image and select it.

Update: Here’s a site dedicated to LP Docks, there’s even an app!

After having ran Bugless Beast 0.4 for nearly 2 weeks on and off, I decided to try CyanogenMod’s latest Froyo (from source) rom, 6.0.0 RC1.

My steps on swapping roms:

1. Titanium Backup all apps
2. Nandroid backup current rom
3. Download CyanogenMod via Rom Manager app

There’s a pre-requisite that you have to be rooted to perform the above. I’ll run through the root process in another update later on. Contrary to what everyone else suggests, I did not wipe data. I simply loaded CM over my previous BB rom. The process took roughly 15 minutes before I was back on my lock screen.

First impression is that its snappy and everything settled in quickly. CM comes with its own tweaking/settings section. My favorite by far is the ability to hide the clock in the status bar. I run Beautiful Widgets, so having two clocks looked weird.

Two tweaks I did was disabling dithering and changing VM size to 32MB. This seems to increase performance just so slightly without sacrificing the look and feel of the rom. I loaded up my current kernel of choice, ChevyNo1′s ultra low voltage 1.25Ghz 7 slot. Currently I’m running ondemand via SetCPU at 250/800Mhz.

I’m currently on hour 12 of running CM, I’ll need to update once I put this rom thru it’s paces over the week. So far, everything looks pretty good in CM land.

Update: so far so good, battery life with heavy 3G data and voice yeilded about 13 hours before needing a charge. One other neat setting is the ability to unlock the phone with just the menu key – VERY convenient.

Update: jdlfg has some updated kernels for CM6RC1 specifically. They’re at version 32.2.2, grab them here via his twitter feed. Supposedly these are battery life saving in nature.