Last fall, I attended the Sprint Open Solutions Conference for Developers http://developer.sprint.com/dynamicContent/devcon2011. It was a great experience for me since I first became a customer in 1997. My first cellphone was a Samsung way back then which was a huge step up from my Motorola beeper!
Anyways, they gave all conference attendees the Samsung-manufactured Google Nexus S, which is running the unmodified Gingerbread Android operating system with NFC and a beautiful screen. Lots of fun.
Unfortunately, the phone only came with 1 month of service and then it became a wifi only device for me. Fast forward a few months and Google released Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. I wanted the new OS for my phone but I didn’t want to root it so I have been waiting for the Over-the-Air (OTA) update from Sprint.
That day has come. In order to get the update, I went to a Sprint Service Center Store in Los Angeles. There, the staffperson swapped out my old phone and did a hard reset on the Nexus S wiping out all the data . After entering a few codes on her computer and into the phone, the phone came back to life. Within an hour the OTA update was ready. I installed without issue transforming it from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich.
Since I am a developer I figured it was high time for me to start programming this phone. This required installing the right Samsung device driver.
The basic instructions are 1) get the device driver. I used this one for Windows: . You could also find it from the Samsung website thought it’s a little more difficult to navigate. Next, 2) you have to connect the phone via USB and get to the Device Manager. It will show that the driver is not installed properly. 3) You open it up and select update driver. Browse and then select from the List of installed drivers for Samsung’s and then find the one for ADB Interface. I followed the instructions from this Youtube video.
First thing I did was put a Cordova (HTML5 PhoneGap) game I wrote onto the Nexus S. More on that later…