The Nexus Q Meets Restless Hackers

Keyan Riddick / July 11, 2012

This past Google I/O, the giant company introduced a device that could pull media from your smartphone or tablet and stream it out of another device, such as movies from your TV or music from speakers. In comes the Nexus Q, Google’s mighty media streamer. Although the device was originally built to bounce media throughout devices, it is still a Nexus…

That being said, Nexus generally means that said device will be open and friendly for anyone who wants to tinker with it. Enter stage right, developers and hackers alike. At first the Nexus Q was simply a media bridge, nothing more, running Android ICS. Now the device has been loaded and booted with a full launcher and has also been paired with external bluetooth devices.

First up, using adb (a command-line interface used to interact with an android device) developer Kornyone has successfully pushed CyanogenMod’s very own Trebuchet ICS launcher over to the Q. Although I’m sure the Nexus Q was never intended to have a full-blown launcher installed, this technique works quite well. Only several small things don’t work, including home-wallpapers and on-screen button mapping. Also, here’s a video of it in action:

Next up is the pairing of the Q and outside bluetooth devices. With the Q being rooted very quickly after being announced we were able to play full games through it. Well, what better way to play games than with the assistance of a mouse? Now you can, thanks to XDA member fredc888. After editing the bluetooth configuration file directly from the system partition of the Nexus Q, since the Nexus Q doesn’t have a traditional bluetooth menu, fredc888 was able to connect a bluetooth mouse to the Q

All these tweaks are available for the masses, but take caution as these tweaks aren’t for the light-hearted. You WILL be rooting your device and editing system files, plus the unbricking methods for the Nexus Q are sparse and unstable. If this warning didn’t scare you off though and you’re still interested, check THIS LINK for the launcher pushing and HERE for the bluetooth configurations.

Ciao!

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Tags:bluetooth device devices launcher Nexus Q rooted screen smartphone TV video xda youtube

By Keyan Riddick

Keyan is a college student who has an intense passion for mobile technology, especially that which revolves around Android. He tries to get his hands on every device that gets released and also on as much Android related swag as possible. You can catch him always connected to his social network, if you have help, a question, or just want to chat.