Everybody wants a piece of the pie. Or in this case, the ice cream sandwich. No one wants to be left out in the cold without an even colder delicious treat to make it all worth it. Are HTC customers any different than the rest of us who waited and waited to get just a little taste of creamy heaven? Nope. They want it just as bad. So naturally, users who own and still use HTC devices were all but upset when HTC announced the line-up of phones to receive Android 4.0. You can guess that most of the line-up was comprised of dual-core devices. However there were a few single core devices hiding on that list as well. One of which was the HTC Desire HD. Recent announcements from HTC though has brought to light that the Desire HD will in fact not be getting the ICS update. Rumors had spread like wildfire of this around other countries when HTC reps were overheard stating some reasons for this was due to hardware constraints. I have to say I agree with the rest of the outraged users amongst the disappointed masses that hardware constraints is a cop-out excuse. There are single core devices out there running ICS. Hell, the HD2 has a pre alpha build of Jelly Bean. JELLY BEAN!!! You know that new update that comes after ICS? And guess what, its running a 1GHz single-core processor. This is what HTC had to say today in regards to the backlash from their announcement about the lack of ICS on the Desire.
“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.”
Whether this explanation is most likely not going to win back over the majority of the customers who are using the HTC Desire HD, some may find this an acceptable reason to HTC’s final decision to go back on their word. Typically, stating something is going to happen and then turning around and retracting that statement is not generally good business. It’s not even good in everyday life when dealing with others People tend to look at situations like that negatively. Hopefully in the future HTC will be more prepared to quote accurate listings of firmware updates when deciding to choose certain devices for newer software pushes. Having previously been part of a group who was otherwise neglected by the manufacturer of the device I was carrying, I feel the pain and upset emotion that Desire HD users are probably feeling right now. Hope is not yet lost though, for the dedicated and savvy few will not accept this decision and take to the web to find alternate ways of getting the software they were promised through rooting their devices and loading on custom baked ROM’s. How pissed off are you that HTC has made this decision? Do you buy it?