Even if you’re not impressed with the Nexus S, you should be impressed by the enthusiast developers who have already given the handset a proper rooting, complete with a custom recovery image. At the same time, is anyone surprised that the Nexus S is already rooted and ready for custom ROMs?
Unlocking the bootloader of the Nexus S is painfully simple, and is the same way one would unlock the bootloader of a Nexus One. With the Nexus One, after unlocking the bootloader, the boot screen showed an opened padlock, signifying a OEM unlock, and it could not be undone. This is not the same with the Nexus S, and it looks like you can actually re-lock it. It seems to work that way, anyway. Unlocking this little padlock icon voids the warranty, so the ability to re-lock the bootloader is a very good thing.
The custom recovery image that’s used on most rooted Android phones today, ClockworkMod, has also been installed onto the Nexus S. Custom recoveries allow a user to install custom ROMs, and soon there will be many for this handset. Once the source code is released for Gingerbread, developers will be able to optimize the crap out of the stock Gingerbread ROM, and we’ll be able to give some more juice to the already powerful Hummingbird processor. It could that use extra umph.
One of the benefits of rooting a device is that you can remove the carrier’s bloatware that comes pre-installed with the phone, but since this is pure Google, that’s not really a problem. You can still remove some Google apps, yet some rely on each other and it wouldn’t be well advised until you know what you’re doing. There’s not much else you can do with a rooted Nexus S right now, aside from taking advantage of all the root-only applications.
So while the Nexus S owners are having fun with their new-found root access, the rest of us can look forward to a port of Gingerbread sometime in the near future.
[Via: AndroidPolice, XDA (source)]