In spite of Samsung's best efforts to bury the news by reporting it a couple of days before Christmas, Friday's disclosure that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't get upgraded to Android 4.0 drew a lot of justified ire. Now the company seems to be backtracking like a champ, as reported by ajnews in Korea, by claiming that it will review the viability of updating those two devices in response to strong customer demand. While restating the difficulties of fitting its entire software footprint onto the Galaxy S and Tab's limited memory capacity, Samsung has been quoted as saying it'll investigate ways to try and make it work. We've reached out to Samsung for official comment on the matter and will update you as soon as we hear back.
Samsung said to be reviewing Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab ICS upgrades in response to demand
Samsung has backtracked on its decision to not upgrade the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab to Android 4.0, now saying it'll investigate upgrades for the two devices in response to strong customer demand.
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Comments
take off Touchwiz and it wouldn’t be as much of a problem _
By JNTHNL on 12.27.11 7:39am
EXACTLY!
By LunarFlame17 on 12.27.11 7:40am
Yea, just give us vanilla ICS! No one wants CrapWiz.
By quillaja on 12.27.11 8:05am
You mean Suckwhiz… You have to both rhyme, and create innuendo to have an effecting mock monicker :)
By dark4181 on 12.28.11 12:25am
*effective
Damn you, lack of edit!
By dark4181 on 12.28.11 12:25am
If they were to do that, they would need to either:
A) Not make it an OTA update but instead something manual. So people like us, and others in the “know” would be able to have stock ICS
B) Make it an optional OTA, but also have so way for people to easily revert.
Because:
These people bought their phones with Touchwiz, and it’s likely the only thing they’ve learned and now know how to easily use. The vast majority of users do not know what ICS is, have probably never used stock, and probably couldn’t care less about it. Samsung can not simply push out an update to the these basic users that would completely revamp their device. More people would be pissed than excited, and would see it as a downgrade.
By Dr. Shenanigans on 12.27.11 8:40am
Exactly.
It’s a feature. People might’ve purchased the phone because it had TouchWiz. Or perhaps they are just used to it.
In a community like this one, we value new functionality more than absolute reliability. But in the real world, consumers value reliability at least as much as new functionality.
If you change the user interface (by adding/removing TouchWiz or moving from Gingerbread/to ICS), you jeopardize that reliability.
By ImSpartacus on 12.27.11 9:35am
It’s no bigger a switch than Gingerbread to ICS, and people seem to be handling that just fine.
By thommiller on 12.27.11 11:11am
the comment is under the assumption(per Samsung) that there is not enough ROM for ICS and Touch Wiz, so the update may have to be Stock ICS
By VoxMediaUser620332 on 12.27.11 11:41am
they would loose their desktop layout and it would probably require a factory reset too.
By paulroberts on 12.27.11 6:06pm
*lose even, where’s that edit button…
By paulroberts on 12.27.11 6:07pm
I agree. People outside of the tech sphere hate upgrades. They dread having to relearn how to use something, and it doesn’t matter if it’s better. Hence the millions who use windows xp with IE 6. And how everytime Facebook gets an upgrade, its swamped with people screaming about how bad it is, creating pages and petitions to get it reverted, etc.
By iCello on 12.27.11 11:47am
You mean my friends Mom isn’t doing an ICS countdown too? /s
I want ICS bad but I prefer my unique form factor more than ANY update.. I’m not even sure I could honestly ask Samsung to update EVERY Galaxy S past GB when the benefit is so small..
Most of the design changes wouldnt make it and the new features wouldnt even make a bullet point on a display case.. Face unlock, new settings menu, hardware accel, and new multitasking.. To the average person none of those matter and hardware accel is the only thing could improve their experience but most wouldnt notice it and if it was that big of a deal they would have left..
I’d prefer them to put the money into the next phone I may buy
By VoxMediaUser620332 on 12.27.11 11:39am
Slightly OT, but the Galaxy S doesn’t really have ‘unique form factor’…..as for me, I like my phones to receive updates for at least the 24 month contract duration.
By VoxMediaUser608076 on 12.27.11 12:04pm
The OG international Galaxy Tab does, though. Unless you can tell me of another 7" display phone (yes, the international version does make calls)
By Hamaki on 12.27.11 2:04pm
Galaxy S updates via Samsung’s Kies software, and no notifications have ever been issued as to the availability of an update for them (at least on my carrier).
I hope Samsung go through with the update, and in many ways it could work out even better for them – why not go the whole hog and issue it with OTA updates as in being an official device – it virtually is anyway under the skin (hello Nexus S), and then, when the updates stop coming, Samsung can say ‘ask Google, nothing to do with us anymore’…
By atomicsolar on 12.27.11 1:08pm
if it contains same type of optimization as Galaxy SII over its competitors, i would welcome TW with open arms. GSII was the first android phone to show real smoothness in UI and web browser
By ph00ny on 12.27.11 10:59am
Are there any custom ROMs with GSII smoothness?
By sonicmerlin on 12.27.11 9:27pm
YES, PLEASE.
By mrkmrk on 12.27.11 11:42am
If they remove Touchwiz, it will confuse the customers out there who bought the Samsung iPhone. Suddenly their interface will change, and they will be exposed to some completely foreign UI called “stock Android”. They could be up in arms about this, returning their phones and demanding an iPhone again. :)
By drakino on 12.27.11 12:50pm
There is no doubt in my mind that Samsung could keep the skin and custom launcher they’ve got on there and just take out all the bloatware and redundant sync services that just take up room in the system partition, and it would run beautifully and no one would be able to tell that touch wiz was even gone.
By thommiller on 12.27.11 2:19pm
but then…how can they differentiate themselves?..look i also find these overlays crappy…but I do understand the need for them especially in the android ecosystem. If u want vanilla ICS then buy Nexus….if u do not want to buy nexus…then u have to deal with crappy overlays.
By watson on 12.27.11 1:16pm
Simply make Touchwiz a launcher like Go Launcher or ADW.
By jbrandonf on 12.27.11 7:11pm
Touchwiz is a ripoff of iOS to begin with.
By sonicmerlin on 12.27.11 9:27pm
In the app menu and 4 icon dock at least…
By EngadgetTiMNVerge on 12.27.11 9:28pm