I’ve been seeing many people in the Nexus 4 community over on Google+ getting anxious about getting the KitKat update. Well this isn’t quite the update, but it’s something even better. Google has just posted the full factory image for KitKat for the Google Nexus 4. Which means you won’t have to wait for the OTA now. You can simply download the factory image and flash away. It’s actually quite easy to flash it too. I flashed the factory image on my Nexus 5 on Tuesday during the AH Show, which shows you how easy it is to do. Here’s a quick tutorial
- Download the Android SDK
- Extract the SDK
- Download the latest factory image from here
- Unzip the contents of that folder inside the SDK/platform-tools folder of the Android SDK
- Open a command prompt window from within that folder (Shift + Right-click)
- Next you’ll want to type in these commands
adb reboot bootloader fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-filename.img fastboot reboot-bootloader fastboot flash radio radio-filename.img fastboot reboot-bootloader fastboot -w update image-filename.zip fastboot reboot-bootloader
- Next you’ll want to use the volume and power button to hit the Start button on the bootloader screen.
- That’s it.
So make sure you head on over to Google’s developer site and grab the factory image. It’s also a good idea to download it now in case you’ll need it later, since it’s a kinda big file, it’s better to have it instead of waiting for it to download, in case you are on not-so-good internet.
Now if you guys don’t want to go through all of that, or lose all your data, you can always wait for the OTA which I’d assume Google is pushing out today, although there’s no official announcement just yet. Hopefully we hear something from Google rather soon about the Nexus 4 Android 4.4 OTA.
It’s great to finally see KitKat rolling out to more and more Nexus devices, next up is the Google Play Edition devices. Then it will be interesting to see who will be next to update their devices. Maybe Samsung? HTC? Motorola? Could it be Sony? We’ll see.