Well Galaxy Note owners, it looks like you’re going to have a slightly longer wait than you’d hoped to get Ice Cream Sandwich running on your phabulous phablets. Samsung’s Korean division announced that they’re delaying the release of the official Android 4.0 release for the Galaxy Note to sometime in the second quarter, putting it somewhere between a few weeks and three months away from now. This sort of thing isn’t really surprising given Samsung’s track record, though the relatively timely update of the Galaxy S II had us hoping that ICS would be coming to the Note sooner rather than later.
To help soften the blow, Sammy also announced that it would be throwing in a “Premium Suite” of new applications designed for use with the S-Pen stylus. These include My Story, a sort of digital postcard app, Shape Match, an engine that can recognize geometric shapes drawn on the screen, and formula match, a heuristic app that will recognize and solve standard mathematics equations written with the S-Pen. Oh, and Samsung was quick to remind its users that they’ll have access to 30 exclusive levels of Angry Birds Space when it launches tomorrow today.
All that’s fine and dandy, but I’m sure that most advanced Galaxy Note users would much prefer to have an up-to-date OS rather than a few new included apps, especially considering how many are already on the device. Even waiting until the end of the second quarter wouldn’t put the Note too far behind the rest of the pack, at least by the lackadaisical standards of manufacturer Android updates, but it’s still disappointing to see a flagship premium device go without a much-needed update for so long. US readers, note that this announcement is directed at owners of the international Galaxy Note – AT&T’s LTE version will likely be at lest a month or two behind its GSM brother.
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Does this mean its also delayed for the SII on at&t?
Shouldn’t. Since it’s already out for S2. Now it’s up to AT&T.
They must be optimizing OS for Galaxy Note’s stylus. I just hope they don’t spend all that time on just those extra apps, but rather on OS smoothness.
This is why i’m rooted, and running a pure AOSP build of ICS on my Note. Samsung are terrible when it comes to updates, TouchWiz is awful and I hate being a whole OS version (or two, if we count Honeycomb) behind a growing number of phones.
Sort it out Samsung!
You Have a point but just FYI, Honeycomb is a strictly tablet OS. 🙂
You Have a point but just FYI, Honeycomb is a strictly tablet OS. 🙂
I have the international version of note and i dont want to root it. For me this ics push to q2 is like an accident. Samsung is loosing customers just because of this. Or may be they are hiding something great about the note and they will reveal later abt it.
WHO CARES! Samsung can go to Hellz for all I care anymore. My Galaxy 10.1 tablet wi-fi to ICS…. Sure! Whatever… You said that 6 months ago… S-c-r-e-w Y-O-U!!! This company is the worst ever! The darn update has been ready, approved, tested and set forever! and they have NO REASON WHATSOEVER why they haven’t released it yet… I posted on Samsung FB and TWITTER and got the following response “Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience. We will let you know the moment it is released and ready.”