Update to Android 4.0 ICS?

[iJimaniac]

Hey, lebellium, have you asked them to look into fixing the bug with belkin routers where it drops the connection every minute or so?

[CrowdAds]

[lebellium]

I reported some bugs from the bugs thread last week (but not yours, if it only occurs with belkin routers there is no chance they investigate that issue)

BUT sadly I have to announce something to you guys:
I just learned today that my last contact working in the mp3 department in Korea just changed his job. Over the last 3 months, 2 contacts of mine at Samsung France also changed their job. They all still work at Samsung and I'm still in touch with them but they have been moved to another department and thus cannot really help me about DAPs anymore, they have other things to do now. For me that's the sad end of 6 years (!!) of very close cooperation with those people. The end of a great era.

Concretely, that means that it's getting hard for me to report bugs now, but also harder to get information about new products etc etc. Most probably I'll get in touch with new people in charge of DAPs at Samsung France but unfortunately, new people at Samsung Korea don't speak English and thus cannot work with me...

It's a pretty sad day for me
Thank you guys for your comprehension

[skwatch]

Sad for you and for us as well. You have been a great resource on this site. Hopefully someone with whom you can communicate will come into a key position at Samsung soon. I don't suppose you ever heard anything about the compass reliability bug with Gingerbread?

Stay on the boards, even without the connections, I'm sure you will be quite helpful. But I have a feeling good connections will eventually be restored.

[TapperP]

That's too bad. Hopefully you will establish new connections.

[lebellium]

Should not be too hard to establish new connections in France but may be much more difficult to get new contacts in Korea because of the different culture and their poor english level. Getting a good contact at Samsung Korea was the achievement of several years of hard work to gain their trust and may be impossible to reproduce now

[iJimaniac]

Just thought I would give you a heads up that ICS HAS BEEN PORTED TO THE 5.0 AN SOON TO THE 4.0!! They haven't posted any download yet, but there should be one soon (for testing). http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...408312&page=13

[steinburger1109]

Originally Posted by iJimaniac

Just thought I would give you a heads up that ICS HAS BEEN PORTED TO THE 5.0 AN SOON TO THE 4.0!! They haven't posted any download yet, but there should be one soon (for testing). http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...408312&page=13

Good sir, I have not seen a more appropriate time for big, caps locked font. Kudos.

[mattg3]

If you upgrade to ICS do you loose your Apps?Dont want to loose my poweramp i just paid for and set up with a ton of music.

[bbtiger]

Originally Posted by lebellium

I haven't got the confirmation from Samsung yet but I guess you can forget ICS on the Galaxy Players 4.0 and 5.0. Indeed the Galaxy S won't be upgraded officially for technical reasons (they claimed that there is no enough memory for both ICS and Touchwizz ) so there is no reason that the galaxy players with almost the same hardware spec get it

They said the same thing for the Galaxy S smartphone variant and this just infuriates me We now have a fully functional ICS ROM for the Galaxy S phone without the TouchWizz bloated wares on top. This is strictly a business decision ('course Sammy wants to sell newer phones) and not because of technical reason as they claimed.
We just don't know how big the market is for the Galaxy players series vs Ipid..., I meant Ipod. Look, whatever Sammy's original intention was, the Galaxy players was based on a very good and versatile ecosystem (i.e., Android) and its future prospect seems to be in good position and I'm sure it's big enough that they should put more resource to make it competitive.

[lebellium]

Originally Posted by bbtiger

They said the same thing for the Galaxy S smartphone variant

I guess you did not read carefully what I wrote. I was actually talking about the smartphone. Samsung don't make official public declarations about Galaxy Players as the market is way smaller than for smartphones (i.e. nobody cares) but what's true for smarphones is likely to be true for the galaxy players too.
The 4.0 and 5.0 won't get official Ice Cream Sandwich.
The new gingerbread firmware for 5.0 planned since November 2011 has still not been released yet so....

And I DO believe they cannot technically upgrade the Galaxy S and Galaxy Players to ICS WITH Touchwizz
Of course they could technically do it without Touchwizz but from a marketing point of view that's not doable. Indeed, Samsung strongly believes Touchwizz is added value in spite of all criticism

[Lagoo56]

Now if they can just get the ability to make my SGP 5.0 become a morpher so I can transform into a Power Ranger in the next firmware update then all would be perfect

[DataPath]

Originally Posted by lebellium

Indeed, Samsung strongly believes Touchwizz is added value in spite of all criticism

The marketing speak is to call it a value-add, but I suspect the strategists in the company think of it more in terms of "differentiation" than "value-add".

[Goucham]

At the risk of being run out of the forum with pitchforks, what exactly is it that ICS gives us SGP users specifically?

There will come a time, when ICS optimized apps are the norm but given the state of the Android ecosystem I honestly don't see that happening for a little while. On top of that, the really good ICS apps will probably have CPU requirements far surpassing what the current gen of SGP hardware can do.

This is not to say that I'm not all for getting ICS on these things (I'm continually impressed with what the community is able to come up with) but at the end of the day, I don't see the point of upgrading to ICS unless there is some quantifiable improvement over the current Gingerbread implementation. For example, if it gets me a snappier experience, sign me up. If I get eye-candy that bogs down the system then, pass.

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Goucham

At the risk of being run out of the forum with pitchforks, what exactly is it that ICS gives us SGP users specifically?

I think that is an excellent question. Given the hardware that we have, I don't have any issue with Gingerbread.

I was fascinated to hear today, from my co-worker who just got a Galaxy Note phone, that it runs Gingerbread 2.3.6.....which is what I have on my my SGP 5.0. Granted, the Note is one that will certainly get ICS sometime this year, but its hardware is significantly upgraded from my 5.0.

My Tab that I just got has Honeycomb 3.2.....so I'm starting anew with learning to use a device....lol.

[bbtiger]

Originally Posted by Goucham

...I don't see the point of upgrading to ICS unless there is some quantifiable improvement over the current Gingerbread implementation. For example, if it gets me a snappier experience, sign me up. If I get eye-candy that bogs down the system then, pass.

I can only speak for ICS experience on my SGH-i897 (aka Captivate with single core and 512MB of RAM)... it runs butter smooth and better battery life compared to stock ROM (i.e., Android 2.2 or Froyo). Keep in mind that Google has learned to optimize Android in terms of user experience and smoothness with the 4th generation OS release to compete with IOS and that is a good thing for all users like us. I had Gingerbread ROM on my rooted Captivate on before and I can tell you now that after having ICS on for a last few months, I would NOT come back to GB. It's that good.

[steinburger1109]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android...Cream_Sandwich

That's my go-to for when I'm wondering why I should upgrade, be it to 2.3.6 or to ICS.

The most appealing thing to me in that list is snappier performance (YUM!)

[Goucham]

Originally Posted by steinburger1109

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android...Cream_Sandwich

That's my go-to for when I'm wondering why I should upgrade, be it to 2.3.6 or to ICS.

The most appealing thing to me in that list is snappier performance (YUM!)

Thanks for the link. I'd seen some of that before but it is nice to see everything in one place. I'll withhold judgement on the performance bit until development is further along but to be honest, I'd much rather see, if at all possible with the current hardware, the ability to do 720p video from the rear camera or even a slight improvement in the still-camera performance. Anything else would be gravy.

[Marvin the Martian]

I am curious about this, I must admit, after having seen this image....



I fully expect ICS to end up on my Tab, but getting it on the SGP 5.0 would be cool too.

[exodus454]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

I am curious about this, I must admit, after having seen this image....


I fully expect ICS to end up on my Tab, but getting it on the SGP 5.0 would be cool too.

I'm running CM9/ICS on my 5.0 right now. Been using it for 2ish days now and no major gripes with it so far. It's officially in pre-alpha over on XDA and works really well for being such an early build.

As of yet it's CM9/ICS with the 2.6 kernel (based off entropy's kernel for the 5.0) for now. I guess they'll be backporting the newer kernel soon. There's no hardware acceleration as of yet either, so speed is about the same as gingerbread was. Netflix and a few other hw accel apps don't work, but that's not a huge deal for me.

Progress!!

[exster]

That looks really nice!