I guess it’s going to be my three-year anniversary with my Nexus One comes end of March, so it’s kind of fitting to blog about it again. The $500+ purchase was what it was. Planning a trip to Japan later in the year, I decided to pull the N1 out of storage (especially since I gifted it to Dad, who has since found a spare AT&T HTC One lying around) and put Jelly Bean on it. And it is on it–4.1.2.

My Verizon Galaxy Nexus, until this moment, was on 4.1.1.

Com’on Man. Ok, yeah, I’ve grated on this enough. I’ll stop now (until the next Android update).

You might’ve read some news clipping on the Nexus One being sent into space as a part of a school satellite project. You know what? That phone is probably just as flimsy as the next Made-in-China consumer hardware, speaking of averages. However it’s probably one of the toughest phones out there rocking the vanilla variety of android, and because it was a reference development phone, it’s also “open” enough so developers can easily run circles around it and, well, make it run Android 4.1.2, despite its aging hardware specs. Or whatever you use for satellites. I bet it uses ext4. I never thought I had to format a micro SD card with ext4. Srsly. I can see why all these reference Nexus hardware are ditching the micro SD slots. Ext4, man.

I just want to say I spent about as much time doing that as side-loading 4.2.2 on my VZW GNex. Srsly. Well, not counting the 4 hours subsequent trying to load all the gapps I want on the N1. In the end I didn’t even a2sd gmail, which is regrettable but at this point I’m way too lazy to circle back for it.

PS. Japan now can support UTMS 2100 MHz, which does mean your garden variety iPhone (GSM) and Nexus items will work in Japan. Yay.