Android 5.0 Lollipop is upon us. That means Material Design goodness for those who are running a supported Nexus device. In this particular case we’re now referring to the Google Nexus 10. If you’re a current user of that tablet than this will apply to you. The factory images for those who are uninitiated are a way to load on the latest Android software without waiting for the OTA. If you aren’t sure what the factory images were or have never worked with them before, then we’d recommend simply waiting for the OTA to hit your device. With that being said, if you’re comfortable loading factory images then by all means proceed further. Note: Read everything before you commit to starting any steps if you’re not familiar with the process already. We aren’t responsible for anything that happens to your device in this process.
As you may well know, loading a factory image onto your device is going to wipe all the data off of it. because of this factor if you don’t want to lose some of the data that you have you’ll want to be sure and do a solid backup before moving forward. This is just to save any and all important files that you don’t want to lose. If you’re OK with wiping your data and essentially resetting your device, you can grab the factory image download for your device by heading to this link, then proceed to follow these steps:
1. Unzip the contents of the factory image file you downloaded and make sure to Unzip them into your SDK/platform-tools folder
2. Open the command prompt from inside the platform-tools folder
3. proceed to type up each one of these commands. Type the command, wait for it to complete, then move on to the next command.
*If using a Mac, be sure to add ./ in front of all commands (ex: ./fastboot reboot-bootloader)
adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-<insert-image-name-here>.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader
fastboot flash radio radio-<insert-image-name-here>.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader
fastboot -w update image-<insert-image-name-here>.zip
fastboot reboot-bootloader
4. This is an option for getting back to a completely stock build without root and a locked bootloader:
fastboot oem lock
5. For keeping an unlocked bootloader during this process all you have to do is tap the power button from the start screen.
6. That’s it. You should now be back to a completely stock device.
That’s pretty much it. If you were able to make it through this tiny tutorial then you should have Lollipop now installed on your device. If you decided to wait for the OTA, you do have one other option which requires you to be rooted, and that’s loading on the stock ROM based off of the OTA. Once that is released for the Nexus 10, we’ll update this post so you can load everything up.