Samsung: No Ice Cream for the Galaxy Tab 7" or Galaxy S smartphone

Samsung: No Ice Cream for the Galaxy Tab 7″ or Galaxy S smartphone

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Samsung has announced that it will not be releasing an official Android 4.0 update for the original 7 inch Galaxy Tab or the Samsung Galaxy S, one of the most popular Android smartphones on the market.

The reason? They simply don’t have the hardware to support a decent user experience. And by decent experience, I mean after Samsung loads its TouchWiz software on top of Android and wireless carriers bundle whatever extra software they want to install.

See, here’s the thing. Under the hood the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab 7″ are a lot like the Samsung Nexus S (Google’s last-generation developer phone). All three devices have 1 GHz Samsung Hummingbird single core processors and 512MB of RAM.

The difference is that the Nexus S ship with just Google’s software and none of Samsung’s. That’s why Google is pushing out Android 4.0 for the Nexus S right now, but Samsung says that similar hardware can’t support the operating system — because Samsung’s own software increases the resource usage.

The good news is that newer Samsung devices such as the company’s 8.9 inch and 10 inch tablets and the Galaxy S II smartphone will all get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The bad new is that millions of Galaxy S owners are going to be left behind — unless they void their warranties, root their phones, and install custom ROMS such as CyanogenMod 9.

Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is the first version of Google’s mobile operating system designed to run on phones and tablets alike. It also includes improved graphics, a new system-wide font called Roboto, spell-checking, voice input improvements, a new contact manager, and other improvements.

via The Verge

Posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011, 9:00 am by Brad Linder | 9 Comments

Reter

I guess TouchWiz and preloaded apps really do add very significant bloat. Samsung is telling us to not buy their stuff because they’re slow by being unnecessarily weighed down.
Bruce

The current version of Cyanogenmod supports themes. There are a couple of themes that can be loaded that will make Cyanogenmod look and feel like Samsung’s phones or tablets. There is no guarantee that the Theme Chooser will retained in Cyanogenmod 9, but I think it will.

I think what Samsung is saying here is that they are not as good at writing phone and tablet OS software as Cyanogenmod and the open source community.
Raiz

No, they’re saying that you have to buy new phones and tablets and many people will do just that.
Cho CoMo

“unnecessarily weighed down”
Not necessarily. It takes resources to store/execute code.
Sometimes the bag is too small to hold even the minimum sh!t.
Therefore; need a bigger bag.
Such is life; accept it.
TikTok

Resources are unnecessarily used up for unnecessary bloat. I hope the tablet Google is talking about making will come out soon.
Rmwill

So much for the myth of Android upgradeability. I always thought that TouchWiz was a bloated POS, and now Samsung actually admits it. If you liked Windows XP, you will LOVE an Android device.
TM

I hope Google comes out with a Nexus tablet. Also, it better not be made by Samsung.
animatio

don’t get your point with android. XP is a stable os for almost 12 years now … same version btw …. (i do not call upgrades versions).
Rmwill

XP is not stable after a few months of usage (like android), has in inconsistant user interface (like android), suffers from pc maker bloatware/garbage (like android), and nearly always requires new hardware with every major release (like android). At least Google recognizes this and bought the Motorola hardware group to ge some control of an out of control ecosystem.

Samsung: No Ice Cream for the Galaxy Tab 7″ or Galaxy S smartphone

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