android Galaxy S and Tab might get ICS upgrade, after all

[Muhammad Farrukh]

In spite of Samsung's best efforts to bury the news by reporting it a couple of days before Christmas, Friday's disclosure that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't get upgraded to Android 4.0 drew a lot of justified ire. Now the company seems to be backtracking like a champ, as reported by ajnews in Korea, by claiming that it will review the viability of updating those two devices in response to strong customer demand. While restating the difficulties of fitting its entire software footprint onto the Galaxy S and Tab's limited memory capacity, Samsung has been quoted as saying it'll investigate ways to try and make it work. We've reached out to Samsung for official comment on the matter and will update you as soon as we hear back.

TheVerge

[Anibal P]

I still don't get all the "ire" over an almost two year old phone not getting ICS, it wasn't till the announcement of ICS that Samsung vowed to update their devices for 18 months, by then simple math could have told you that the original Galaxy phones were not getting it.

What's going to happen ids that the international version will get some sort of "update" while the American versions like my Vibrant won't and people with pitch another useless fit, that or Samsung wit review the situation and come to the conclusion they already came to, that the original Galaxy line can't properly get ICS running to be worth the effort.

[Teebor]

The ire is probably over a rough sales of around 10 million who won't get ICS, thats a lot of customer to **** off at once, especially if any of them are like me that we got the S but still have another 10-11 months to run on our contract with our phone provider but at the time there was no suggestion of an SGS2 so you would have picked a galaxy S to only be told you are left in the cold and getting no more upgrades when the current OS you have really is still not taking full advantage of the phones hardware

[Muhammad Farrukh]

I still don't get all the "ire" over an almost two year old phone not getting ICS, it wasn't till the announcement of ICS that Samsung vowed to update their devices for 18 months, by then simple math could have told you that the original Galaxy phones were not getting it.

What's going to happen ids that the international version will get some sort of "update" while the American versions like my Vibrant won't and people with pitch another useless fit, that or Samsung wit review the situation and come to the conclusion they already came to, that the original Galaxy line can't properly get ICS running to be worth the effort.

The ire is probably over a rough sales of around 10 million who won't get ICS, thats a lot of customer to **** off at once, especially if any of them are like me that we got the S but still have another 10-11 months to run on our contract with our phone provider but at the time there was no suggestion of an SGS2 so you would have picked a galaxy S to only be told you are left in the cold and getting no more upgrades when the current OS you have really is still not taking full advantage of the phones hardware

In my opinion, its just a public stunt. After a month or so, they'll come out and say, the specs weren't enough to handle ICS, we are sorry

[cyansky]

Here is the spec for the Galaxy S: 8 GB/16GB storage, 512 MB RAM, 2GB ROM

This is same as the LG Optimus 2X that is on the list at 8 GB storage, 512 MB RAM. However I think the ROM on the LG is 8GB (I think this is shared though), but i cannot confirm a exact size without more digging. If these ROMs are over 2GB in size, then they just need to stop stuffing them with aftermarket applications we don't need. Like the install of the game NOVA that came with my LG stock for instance.

[BetaAddict]

Here is the spec for the Galaxy S: 8 GB/16GB storage, 512 MB RAM, 2GB ROM

This is same as the LG Optimus 2X that is on the list at 8 GB storage, 512 MB RAM. However I think the ROM on the LG is 8GB (I think this is shared though), but i cannot confirm a exact size without more digging. If these ROMs are over 2GB in size, then they just need to stop stuffing them with aftermarket applications we don't need. Like the install of the game NOVA that came with my LG stock for instance.

To fully understand the situation, you need to go back a few more days and read this article about ICS and Touchwiz being too large to fit on the devices. Samsung is making such a big deal about this because they cannot install their own bloatware customizations with ICS, and therefore feel that somehow it is better to force people into upgrading their devices than to give them vanilla ICS and include only the essential addon software.

[Sean2989]

I really do hope they can find a way to make it work. If not I'm rather pleased with it as is, ICS would be nice though.

[cyansky]

... and therefore feel that somehow it is better to force people into upgrading their devices than to give them vanilla ICS and include only the essential addon software.

It's all about selling new hardware. You don't make money by upgrading old devices for free. *sigh*

[Vice]

I still don't get all the "ire" over an almost two year old phone not getting ICS, it wasn't till the announcement of ICS that Samsung vowed to update their devices for 18 months, by then simple math could have told you that the original Galaxy phones were not getting it.

Because not only is it only an 18 month old device (Not 24 months like you are suggesting by saying 'almost') but the phone is still sold to this very day. It isn't discontinued by any measure.

In my opinion if they see fit to sell it to consumers today it should run today's software. You would get angry if a computer sold today came with Vista or XP. It should come with the latest software available. Especially when we all know it is fully capable of doing so.