Five days ago, Sprint announced that the Ice Cream Sandwich OTA was finally ready for the Nexus S 4G, but many of you still haven't received the update prompt. Yesterday, Google released the full OS image for the NS4G, but installing it does a full wipe, which may not be ideal for those just itching to upgrade.

Fortunately, the OTA link on Google's servers was finally found today by a number of AC forum members, which means you no longer have to wait for Sprint/Google and instead update your Nexus on your own. Since the OTA file contains the full OS image, including recovery and radio, rather than an incremental update from a specific version, you should be able to update no matter what you're currently running on your phone (feel free to point out otherwise in the comments).

Download (143MB):

MD5: 801f872eb16df581d696e6340e402c4c

Installation Instructions:

  1. Download the update file and rename it to update.zip (make sure it's named update.zip and not update.zip.zip if you're using Windows and have it set to hide file extensions).
  2. Move the file to your phone's /sdcard directory using your favorite method - the easiest way is probably mounting the phone as disk using a USB cable.
  3. Reboot your phone and when it starts booting back up, hold Volume Up + Power.
  4. Select Recovery.
  5. The phone will reboot into recovery but first it'll show an exclamation point and a triangle. At this point, mash the Power and Volume Up buttons a few times until the recovery screen shows up.
  6. Select Apply sdcard update.zip, which should start the update process.
  7. Reboot and enjoy Android 4.0.4.

Image via Muffinabus