There's no rush to get the vast majority of Motorola smartphones and tablets upgraded to Android 4.0 – dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) – anytime soon.
Owners of almost all Moto devices will have to wait until July at the earliest before ICS will be rolled out to them, according to an upgrade road map from the manufacturer. In the U.S., only the Xoom tablet (Family Edition) is slated to get the update before the third quarter of 2012. (Updates for the Wi-Fi-only Xoom started rolling out last month.) The Atrix and Photon smartphones, as well as the company's Xyboard tablets, are scheduled for a Q3 upgrade, but popular handsets like the Bionic, Razr Maxx and Droid 4 are only in the "evaluation and planning" stage, with "details to follow." Upgrades vary depending on country, so for the full list, click here.
You might say the Ice Cream Sandwich is beginning to melt. Hailed by many analysts as a successful version of Android that combines the best of the operating system's smartphone and tablet elements, we learned earlier this week that version 4.0 is only on 1 percent of Android devices worldwide – slow progress considering it launched on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus last fall.
Fragmentation is considered a major reason for the delays in rolling out ICS to more smartphones and tablets. There are dozens of manufacturers offering Android-based devices that are sold by numerous wireless carriers, resulting in a wide variety of release dates for updates.
Samsung, HTC, Sony and LG have all said that the majority of their devices won't get ICS until at least the second quarter of the year – and that Q3 might be most realistic.
