Details:
I\'m extending ActionBarActivity.
Eclipse and SDK fully patched as of 2011-11-06.
On the Nexus 4 people this seems to make the color go grey.
ActionBar bar = getActionBar(); // or MainActivity.getInstance().getActionBar()
bar.setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(0xff00DDED));
bar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false); // required to force redraw, without, gray color
bar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(true);
(all credit to this post, but it is buried in the comments, so I wanted to surface it here) https://stackoverflow.com/a/17198657/1022454