Google announced today via Twitter that the Samsung Nexus S devices of yesteryear will get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich within a month. This news was already announced back in October, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to Nexus S owners, but the rollout is finally commencing. Unfortunately, only users on a GSM network will get the software update. CDMA (Sprint) users will have to wait.
Up until now, the Galaxy Nexus has been the only phone with Ice Cream Sandwich. It arrived on Verizon Wireless as of yesterday in a 32GB flavor for $299.99 with a two-year contract.
Since Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to work with software buttons and eliminates the need for separate hardware buttons as is the case with the Galaxy Nexus, there’s been some speculation about how it would work with older devices like the Nexus S. It’s been confirmed that ICS recognizes hardware buttons and disables the software buttons — good news for those looking to save precious screen real estate.
Android 4.0 isn’t so much about big new features as it is lots of improvements and refinements. It merges all the great features of Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets with the optimization for portability in 2.3 Gingerbread and earlier. Our review of Ice Cream Sandwich found Google’s latest iteration of Android quite favorable.