We have some potentially awesome news for many of you happy Motorola Atrix 4G owners. When the device launched long ago as one of the first Tegra 2 dual-core smartphones it was rather impressive, but since then it has been long forgotten in terms of updates. Today however Motorola might finally be ready to test the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update before releasing it to the public.
Yes, the Motorola Atrix 4G is still sadly stuck on that little running Android 2.3 Gingerbread man, while we’ve all moved on past tasty Ice Cream Sammiches (yes, Sammiches) and now Jelly Bean. We have good news though. Motorola appears to be preparing their usual “soak test” where they’re looking for members to be part of an update early.
Nothing actually confirms this is in fact Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the Atrix 4G, but we’ve seen a few ICS builds leak for the device in the past, so it only makes sense. The issue we have is Motorola’s recently confirmed this device and a few others won’t get ICS, but maybe they changed their minds. News has hit XDA confirming the update soak test (or beta test) so we should be learning additional details here very soon.
We have a feeling this also means the Atrix 4G won’t be getting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and that ICS will be the last official update for the aging yet still capable handset. At least you’ll be able to enjoy that new user interface and better performance from ICS, but Google Now is a no go. If you’re a part of the soak test drop us a comment below and let us know how it goes.
[device id=81]
[via Android Police]
::shakes head:: There is nothing to indicate that this is anything more than a maintenance update, nothing. The leaks we got of the internal build were because Motorola abandoned the update and were no longer working on it, otherwise it would not have been an engineering build, and would have been more polished. In fact, with a bit of searching, you could find a German forum where an alleged Motorola employee reveals why the update was cancelled in the first place, and if I recall, it had to do with the update bricking phones, likely because of the efuses burnt on the last update.
The hardware isn’t an issue and the phone could have been great. Motorola just managed to screw it up royally.
Want hdmi mirroring? Sorry, we disabled that. Want a phone that doesn’t crash due to memory issues and other fixable things? Sorry, we aren’t going to support the software side… cuz we’re a hardware company.
Hopefully Google will clean up the mess, but by then I’ll probably have moved on to a different phone.