Upgraded tab to ICS last night

[Hokiefyd]

I have a 7" Acer A100 tab and it had Honeycomb. It appears that Ice Cream Sandwich is supposed to come out for it mid-April, but I got tired of waiting. There are a few "official" Acer ICS ROMs out there leaked from employees or friends of employees, etc, and the A100 boards are crawling with folks upgrading their tabs. So I tried it last night.

Couldn't be any easier. I downloaded the ROM .zip file, put it on the SD card as update.zip, and re-booted the tablet. It upgraded to ICS in about 5 minutes start to finish. It didn't even wipe the apps off either; it was an in-place upgrade. So all my apps stayed, high scores for games, licenses for paid apps, etc. The only glitch I've had was my CoPilot app didn't think it was registered anymore, so I just uninstalled it and reinstalled it and it's fine. The only bug with this particular ROM I've come across is the speakers will occasionally "crackle", and that's fixed by turning the Dolby audio enhancement system off.

ICS itself is great. It has a much more polished look than HC. It almost seems like my screen resolution has doubled. The fonts are much smoother and seem more crisp. The performance is also better. I haven't had ICS on the tab long enough to know yet, but reports are that wireless performance is better and battery life is extended as well.

I've never modded any of my handheld devices before (root, etc). This was incredibly easy to do, and well worth it so far.

 

[JHZR2]

nice that it was so fast and easy. How big were the files to do this?

 

[saberz]

ICS is great. I bought a firesale HP Touchpad for $149 and love WebOS. But given the winding down of development and waiting for WebOS open source I loaded Cyanogen Mod 7, then version 9(ICS 4.0.4 Kernel). Had a few issues with stability but did a nightly update to the latest Kang release 3/29 and its been awesome.

Very fast, stable and running the Koei Fish Live wallpaper(you should definitely download it off the Market).

 

[Hokiefyd]

The file size was 293 MB.

This is a 4.0.3 build. We'll see what Acer eventually puts out as the official build.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
The file size was 293 MB.

This is a 4.0.3 build. We'll see what Acer eventually puts out as the official build.


Interesting. is it actually a complete OS refit or more like a service pack like windows XP SP3 type thing?

Because when I put a new OS on my iphone, it is like 800+ mb, and takes a while to reflash it. Id think that droid OS would be similarly complex and sizey.

 

[Hokiefyd]

From what I understand, Android is very light-weight. I'd say that it's a full OS upgrade, like Mac OS 10.6 to 10.7.

Each Android release is named after a type of dessert, and in sequential order alphabetically. For example, my phone came with Froyo (which is 2.2), but was upgraded to Gingerbread (which is 2.3.x) OTA. Gingerbread wasn't a huge change from Froyo, but there were some enhancements.

Honeycomb (3.x) was written primarily for tablets. My tablet came preloaded with 3.2.something. Some phones also had/have Honeycomb, but I don't think that's common.

Now the big move is to Ice Cream Sandwhich (4.x). From my understanding, ICS harmonizes phone and tablet features into one OS. Some phones are getting upgraded from Gingerbread straight to ICS.

Where it gets less clear is all the "skins" that OEMs put on Android. For example, my wife's Motorola phone looks nothing like my HTC phone, despite both having Gingerbread. Motorola's skin is called Motoblur and HTC's skin is called Sense. Each skin provides a completely different user interface. And it's more than just fonts and colors; buttons aren't in the same place, settings screens are configured differently, etc. You can tell that they're accessing the same underlying functionality, but the user interface is completely customized.

Fortunately, Acer doesn't really add a whole lot to Android. It's about as "stock Android" as you can get from what I'm seeing.