Android 4.0, otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is supposed to be the next great version of the world's leading smartphone OS. But now Sony, which has pledged to upgrade all of its current phones to 4.0 sometime soon, is saying some users might want to stick with Gingerbread (Android 2.3).
In a developer blog post on Sony's website first sighted by PhoneArena, Sony outlines a list of reasons existing phone owners may not want to jump up to the sleek new interface of Ice Cream Sandwich.
"Ice Cream Sandwich is more intensive, for example in terms of resource usage," the company writes. "The web browser is quite intensive, and our measurements indicate that it uses 20-30MB more in ICS compared to Gingerbread."
Database operations can also be slower, leading to slower startup times for apps that aren't optimized for ICS, Sony says.
"Read and write operations to the SQL database takes longer time, which slows down the apps … this can result in a user experience that is perceived as slower and less stable, due to longer response times and increased [Application Not Responding errors]."
I'm seeing some of this drama on my own HTC Sensation phone, which received an ICS update over the weekend that seems to have completely killed the phone's standby battery life. From 100 percent, it's now down to 46 percent after a mere 3.5 hours, with "mobile standby" taking up a whopping 17 percent of the battery usage.
Phone manufacturers are definitely finding it a challenge to upgrade existing phones to Ice Cream Sandwich. At the moment, the only three ICS phones officially supported by U.S. carriers are Verizon Wireless's Samsung Galaxy Nexus, AT&T's HTC Vivid and T-Mobile and AT&T's much older Samsung Nexus S. (My Sensation got its upgrade because it's an unlocked, international model.)
On Samsung's official blog, meanwhile, members of the company's product planning team said that "it's MUCH easier to just release to a new phone than to upgrade one."
Several U.S. carriers and manufacturers have announced ICS update plans for existing phones, including Verizon Wireless, Motorola and HTC.
For more, see PCMag's full review of Ice Cream Sandwich and the slideshow above.
