First it was in. Then it was out. Then in again! But as you may have read recently here on the Gadget Helpline blog, sadly HTC has now officially delivered the death blow to any chance of seeing the current Android standard Ice Cream Sandwich on the popular Desire HD.
Owners were surprised and quite obviously disappointed to hear the news that the respectable spec smartphone, which features a reasonable 1GHz CPU and 1.5GB of memory, would be omitted from the Android 4.0 roll out after we were previously informed by Taiwanese mobile maker HTC that the smartphone met the minimum criteria needed to host the update. HTC has apologetically addressed its faithful in a statement which reads:
“We’ve heard your feedback on our decision not to update the HTC Desire HD to Android 4.0. We completely understand that this is a controversial decision.
For more background, due to how storage on the HTC Desire HD is partitioned – and the larger size of Android 4.0 – it would require re-partitioning device storage and overwriting user data in order to install this update. While technically advanced users might find this solution acceptable, the majority of customers would not. We also considered ways to reduce the overall size of the software package, but this would impact features and functionality that customers are currently using. Even after installing the update, there were other technical limitations which we felt negatively impacted the user experience.
We believe an update should always improve the user experience and carefully evaluate each update based on this criteria. While we are very aware of the disappointment from this decision, we believe the impact to user experience was too great. We recognize this is a change from our previous statement and for that we’re truly sorry.”
From HTC’s point of view its seems “less is more” when it comes to Android on this particular smartphone, and despite promising the very best user experience we imagine some envious glares from Desire HD owners as they get left behind while the likes of the One S and One X are readying to move swiftly onto Android version 4.1 Jelly Bean.
With Jelly Bean right around the corner it’s been reported that only 10% of compatible devices have received the update to the current version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and most are still running on Gingerbread. Read the Gadget Helpline’s coverage on this story – Here.
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