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The Motorola Xoom 2 and Xoom 2 Media Edition won’t be getting Ice Cream Sandwich until July at the earliest, while the Razr smart phone will be bereft of the latest version of Android until some time between April and June.
Motorola updated its Android 4.0 update estimates in a post on its official forum, with a great big table to show quite how late these devices will be to the ICS party. The Xoom 2 is slated for ‘Q3 2012’, or the quarter from July to September.
The Motorola Razr was originally supposed to get Ice Cream Sandwich in early 2012, which struck me as a long time to wait. How naive I was back then, in that golden October. It was a younger time, a simpler time.
When I saw the Xoom 2 and its Media Edition prior to their launch last year, I was told Ice Cream Sandwich — which has been available to manufacturers since mid-November — would be headed their way ‘in due course’, which to my mind didn’t mean waiting until at least this summer.
The wait is agonising enough, made even more frustrating when you remember that Google is romantically entangled with Motorola.
No doubt squeezing Ice Cream Sandwich under Motorola’s custom Android skin is no simple process, but those who splashed out on the Xoom 2 will be wondering why they’re being denied the latest version of Google’s mobile OS.
The next version of Android — version 5.0, aka Jelly Bean — is reported to be arriving in the second half of this year. If those rumours pan out, there’s every chance that by the time Ice Cream Sandwich arrives on the Xoom 2, the next version of Android will already be out there.
The promise of regular, timely updates is a strong incentive to buy into Android, and if people can’t expect those updates, then the iPad is going to look more and more tempting to tablet shoppers.
This is a tech issue that frustrates me. In January I reported that Ice Cream Sandwich was running on just 0.6 per cent of Android devices. Meanwhile Apple and Microsoft are beavering away on updates to their own operating systems, and Android risks being left in the dust.
How long do you think is an acceptable period to wait for Android updates? Are you itching for Ice Cream Sandwich, or are you quite content with Gingerbread or Honeycomb? Tell me in the comments, or over on our Facebook wall.
