Galaxy Archives - Serious Startups

AT&T Branded Galaxy Note And Galaxy S II Skyrocket Are Receiving ICS Today

AT&T Galaxy users shall be rejoicing as of today, because Samsung announced that both the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II Skyrocket will be receiving Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Now, ICS isn’t even the newest version of Android anymore, and the devices will only be getting 4.0.4 and won’t get the upgrade to the newest version of TouchWiz, but it’s still ICS. Android 4.0 will bring a slew of improvements from lessened visual lag to ICS-only apps and app updates.

The Note and the GSII Skyrocket have been some of AT&T’s best devices to offer for quite a while, and really have only been best by the HTC One X and of course, the Galaxy S III. The Note will be receiving a better deal from this upgrade than the Skyrocket though, with its “premium suite” of apps. A specialized S Memo and S Note app will be coming, both updated to newer versions, My Story will be receiving an upgrade as well. It’s good to see Samsung still supporting these devices after the launch of their new flagship phone, and users can grab the update today via the Samsung Kies desktop application.

Questions have been raised since the Galaxy Nexus landed on Verizon which/what is AOSP and what isn’t. Well just now, Jean-Baptiste Queru just took to Google+ to explain that the upcoming Sprint LTE version isn’t going to be AOSP.

The short answer is: the Sprint Galaxy Nexus is not supported in the Android Open Source Project.

The long answer: the release process for the Spring Galaxy Nexus is similar to that of the non-yakju variants of the GSM Galaxy Nexus (e.g. yakjuxw, yakjuux, yakjudv…), which makes that device similarly impossible to support in AOSP. There are no source files, no proprietary hardware-related binaries and no factory images available for the Sprint Galaxy Nexus. In addition, since it’s a CDMA device, it would probably be limited by the usual CDMA licensing issues that have been affecting the other CDMA devices.