This is for those among you who are lucky enough to own a Nexus S, and luckier enough to have flashed one of the Alpha builds of Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich onto it. I remember when the first builds were out a few days ago, the functionality was extremely limited, with the kinks getting ironed out one by one over the days, and over builds. While the ICS ROMS out today are still far from being suitable for daily usage, they are still more functional than the earlier ones.

What we have here today, thanks to XDA developers kwiboo & koush, is a MOD which enables the On-screen Buttons on the Nexus S running ICS ROMs. While some may feel that it is not that important or useful, considering the Nexus S has dedicated hardware keys, there are also folks who feel it is essential, in line with the complete ICS experience. Personally I think its pretty cool 🙂

There are 2 different mods here ─ you can try out both. There’s also a separate Restore zip available, in case you don’t like what you see after flashing the mod.

Downloads:

Kwiboo’s mod    |   Restore

Koush’s mod      |    Restore

How to flash:

  1. Tranfer downloaded zip to internal SDcard
  2. Boot to recovery
  3. Install zip from SDcard
  4. Choose the zip file you transferred & confirm
  5. That’s it..Youre done

If you want to read what others have to say about this mod, you can read it here.

If you want to disable the backlight for the hardware buttons, you may need Ezekeel’s GLaDOS kernel and arifhn’s NSTools.

So go ahead and give it a whirl, and if you like it, do let us know in the comments below.