“Google’s Hugo Barra confirmed that the latest version of Android will be delivered as a free upgrade to the existing Nexus S handset ‘within weeks’. He said the search giant was aiming to get the software to owners of the previous flagship phone shortly after the release of the new Galaxy Nexus handset next month, well in time for Christmas.
Owners of the first official Google phone, the Nexus One, will not be getting the upgrade, however. Barra said the hardware was simply too old to run the new operating system.” Can someone enlighten me – the Nexus One has 512MB of RAM, a 1Ghz processor, and a 480×800 AMOLED or SuperLCD. Why on earth isn’t this thing upgraded to ICS? Lameballs.
The speculation on XDA is that since the Nexus One only has 512mb of internal flash storage, there simply isn’t enough space for ICS without putting big chunks of the OS residing on the SD-card, which is a pretty tricky thing to implement. There is some experimentation with a feature called system2sd, and it probably can be made to work, but it won’t be sanctioned by Google and will be left to the land of CyanogenMod, et al.
Edited 2011-10-26 22:47 UTC
I thought about that, but if I recall correctly, the ROMs on ROM Manager on my Galaxy SII are only like 200MB, at most. Surely, ICS didn’t grow that fast?
Actually, while Nexus One (and his brother, HTC Desire which I own) have 512MB of internal storage, like any Android device, this is divided on some partitions. On the case of Nexus One, it have 145MB for /system, 90MB of /cache and 287MB of /data. The ROM is stored on the first (of course), and this is a very small space even for CyanogenMod 7.1 itself (that uses ~140MB). A “pure” Gingerbread build should use almost 100MB for a full compilation (including all locales, Google Apps and extras).
JBQ (one of the main AOSP devs) on Android-build said that the source code of ICS is almost the double in terms of size of the Gingerbread. This doesn’t necessary means that ICS will be the double of the size of Gingerbread, but one thing is for sure: it will be bigger. Considering the first ICS ports using SDK (that uses something about 170MB of size), probably ICS will not fit on Nexus One small /system partition.
Edited 2011-10-26 23:30 UTC
The design to decision to have small internal plus SD card storage haunts Android users all the time. You can only install apps on the small app partition. On some phones this fills up pretty quickly. Even if you have gigabytes available on your SD card you can only move installed apps there if they support it. And you have to do it manually, which is cumbersome and beyond the average user.
Apps that are big, like games, will download most of the program on first launch. The App store only contains the downloader for the real program. This is not good design. It’s a clutch.
Actually you can flash alternate partition tables. It should perfectly fit, but you may be left with little space for apps and forced to used app2sd.
yeah on my desire I use leedroid HD data++ with an alternate partition table, data++ gives me more internal storage since some stuff are moved to the SD, but the sense 2.1 sucks a lot of space, hopefully an aosp ICS rom will use the same amount of space as gingerbread+sense 2.1
Why not use a ROM without Sense, then? I personally never liked it anyway.
well I do like sense, I’m just saying that even if ics requires more space, it might be nearly the same as gingerbread + sense 2.1, so still usable on a desire/nexus one
He said the hardware is too OLD, not too small or incapable.
Jokes aside, I agree with him.
Well, since the Galaxy S is mostly a rebranded Nexus S, I wonder if Samsung will make ICS available for it … One can only hope
I have Nexus One. It is a beautiful phone, but it has always suffered the same problems of all Androids, jerky video, jerky movements of the interface, and endless crashes of apps, etc. The 512 Mb of internal storage is just ridiculous and gives warnings of running out of space all the time when you update apps or do anything with the phone. I have an 8 Gb memory card installed in the thing, but the vast majority of Android apps cannot be installed onto external memory, so what good is it to have all this space if you cannot use it? This phone is being relegated to the “old stuff” box while I enjoy the silky smooth interface of my new iPhone 4S.
I have a HTC Desire, and mine never crashes. I run with Oxygen though, the cleanest purest ROM there is; forum.oxygen.im.
I have a nexus one and given that its performances aren’t stellar with gingerbread I wouldn’t want to run ICS on it, even though it is probably technically feasible.
It would just run like shit. It’s like running iOS4 with multitasking enabled on an iphone 3gs: it can be done but it runs like shit so it’s better not to.
Don’t you think that using the gpu like ics does will improve its performance?
I think the main reason for that is the amount of memory it has. 3g 64MB 3gs 128MB 4 512MB 4s 1GB. Nexus has at least 512MB.
Perhaps. On the other hand supporting an older gpu might be a pain in the ass because it may be lacking features that they use in ICS. Also it might need more memory.
For instance, the application switcher in ICS that displays thumbnails of applications: it have to store those thumbnails, which is bound to be memory consuming.
There’s also the screen size factor: I can easily imagine the nexus one’s screen being too cramped for the ICS UI.
Those thumbnails can be easily cached on flash and would take less memory than loading a webpage. Ics will run on the 800×480 1Ghz Nexus S so no it will not be too cramped.
I doubt it. These SOCs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSM7000#MSM7227 have the same GPU as the Snapdragon of Nexus One (which is, overall, still a relatively powerful chip)
They still ship in tons of phones (the likes of LG Optimus One, a device class which will also switch to ICS), and ought to continue doing so for quite some time.
ICS, Android overall, is also (quite possibly primarily, by numbers of users) about such devices – it wouldn’t make sense to exclude them from the benefits, especially when they could use them the most, and “desktop” acceleration doesn’t require the fanciest GPU features, anyway.
Oh, they also virtually always have smaller screens than Nexus One. Generally, Google probably doesn’t want to put off that vast group of people from Android, when the time will come for next phone upgrade; also, new version tended to somewhat improve performance (as long as “basics” – decent RAM amount for example – were in place)