After slightly being pushed back, Samsung’s Galaxy S II phone is ready for an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade.
Unfortunately, if you’re reading this in the US or the UK, or most other markets, this doesn’t apply to you just yet. That’s because the rollout is being tested only in Poland, Hungary and Sweden right now.
The company confirmed that, assuming things are successful, it will begin bringing the update to other markets shortly.
This comes after Samsung had originally pledged to offer the update on March 10. The day before that, the company said that wouldn’t happen and did not expand on what the future of the update would be.
So coming back four days later and saying things are good to go is a nice surprise. The first phone that tried to update was the Nexus S, a phone that Google actually had an active hand in developing. The upgrade process seemed to be running smoothly, with handsets beginning to receive the new OS in December.
But Google quickly yanked the updates after numerous reports of upgraded phones freezing and crashing. It would not admit that was the reason for pulling the update, but we have to assume that it was.
Then, early this year, Asus decided to push Ice Cream Sandwich to its Transformer Prime tablet. Same story. Updates began being sent through, but users reported numerous instances of crashing software as soon as ICS was installed. So that update was yanked as well.
Ice Cream Sandwich came built-in to the Galaxy Nexus phone, and on that device it runs just fine, but getting legacy devices to come on board has been the most embarrassing part of Android’s history to date.
Only about 1% of active Android device are running Ice Cream Sandwich today. Many manufacturers have pledged sweeping updates for their devices, but few have promised to make that happen before the second half of this year.
