After a few days of debating whether or not to buy a Nexus One, I finally gave in a bought one.  Rachael ended up getting a Droid Eris (Verizon) for Christmas, so in the course of a few weeks I gained access to two fantastic Android-powered phones.  I had been compiling a list of mobile application ideas and the fact that I now have the hardware to test on motivated me to start looking into Android development.

After getting the Android SDK setup I needed to connect my N1 and push an application to it for testing on real hardware.  I found some Android documentation that discussed connecting up an Android device over USB.  However, after following the steps on this page, I was still seeing strange output when running adb devices:
List of devices attached
????????????    no permissions
This led to some searching which turned up a blog post.  Basically, the Google Android team hasn’t added the Vendor ID for the Nexus One.  Apparently HTC’s USB Vendor ID isn’t correct.  So, I followed these steps to fix it:

1. Create/edit a udev rules file:
   sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
2. Add the following line to this file:
   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="18D1", MODE="0666"
   (Note the vendor ID of 18D1. This was changed from the HTC vendor code of 0BB4.)
3. Restart udev using either
   sudo reload udev
   or
   sudo service udev reload
4. Connect your Nexus One.
5. Run
   adb devices
   and you should see something like
   List of devices attached
############ device

Hopefully Google updates the documentation to include the Vendor ID 18D1 rather than making us hunt for this number ourselves.  Enjoy!