It’s been a good few weeks for Android device owners who’d been looking forward to their tablets and smartphones being updated to the latest and greatest Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android version 4.0.
Since the middle of last month, the likes of Sony’s entire Xperia series of smartphones, its flagship Tablet S, and even the phenomenally popular Samsung Galaxy S II have received upgrades to ICS.
Now, it is the turn of Samsung’s quirky but bestselling phone/tablet (‘phablet’?), the Galaxy Note, to receive the firmware upgrade over the air.
It has been a quiet upgrade without much fanfare, but then again, it does come to a slightly limited pool of Galaxy Notes. Only the international edition of the Note (code: GT-N7000) has had an update pushed to it so far, and European owners seem to have received the update first. This means that AT&T (or for that matter, any carrier) branded Galaxy Notes are out of the running for the update for the time being.
As usual, Samsung will push in a TouchWiz skinned version of Ice Cream Sandwich, as opposed to stock Android with this new 318 MB upgrade. This means that Samsung will be offering what it calls a ‘Premium Suite’ of S-Pen (Samsung’s version of the Wacom Digitizer) optimized apps in it. This ‘Suite’ includes updated versions of the S Note, Shape Match and My Story apps that are specifically designed for the Note.
There’s no word on when the update will be pushed out to carrier branded Notes in the US, or for that matter, throughout the world, as Samsung is yet to even officially announce this update. What you can be sure of though, is that there will be the usual boost in usability and performance that Android Ice Cream Sandwich brings to the table.
[via Engadget]
