Samsung couldn’t enjoy Ice Cream Sandwich to Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab?

Android is a giant mobile platform that develops at a fast pace, along with each new major version comes confirmation from the OEMs that not every product in existence will be getting that shiny new OS update. Samsung announced that several of its recently released products would be upgraded to Google Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) by March 2012 on Wednesday, including the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Note. The company followed up by saying that the Galaxy S, released in June 2010, and the Galaxy Tab, released in October 2010, will not be able to take the upgrade, despite being fairly recent releases.

Why does Samsung couldn’t enjoy Ice Cream Sandwich to Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab? According to Samsung's official statement: the Galaxy S, which is actually less than 18 months old, doesn't have sufficient RAM or ROM to run the new operating system along with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface overlay. Samsung also said that the Galaxy Tab won't receive an Ice Cream Sandwich update either. The devices' ROMs are too small to hold Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, Widgets, video-calling application, and Android 4.0 at the same time.
For a better perspective of how much RAM Samsung’s custom UI demands, Anandtech found that for the Honeycomb version of Android, TouchWiz consumes about half of the available RAM at startup. Samsung has also announced that many of its other Android devices will be getting the upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus, this year’s flagship Android device, and Nexus S are currently the only devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, but the Galaxy S II Smartphone and the three other Galaxy Tab sizes are reported to be getting the upgrade in the future. The Nexus S runs the same 1GHz Hummingbird processor that the Galaxy S does, but because it’s an Android flagship device — essentially Google reference hardware, it doesn’t run Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.

Announced in October, Ice Cream Sandwich adds a number of new features to devices on the platform, the main one being the unification of the OS for both tablets and Smartphones, as well as the addition of software-based buttons that replace the ones that have been physical buttons. As with other major releases of Android, it carries with its particular hardware requirements, leaving a number of older devices stuck on certain versions indefinitely.

While the original Galaxy S wouldn't have qualified for Samsung's pledge to the Google Android Update Alliance this past May, it does underscore just how important that pledge was—which makes it all the more discouraging that the company danced around the question about Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades for several recent Samsung models. However, many mainstream consumers don’t follow this stuff, and probably aren’t even aware of the new version of Android, much less want to get it. For those more tech-savvy, don’t overlook the outstanding homebrew community that probably has Android 4.0 coming to a device near you.
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