Motorola adds more phones to ICS upgrade list

Motorola updated its master “Android Software Upgrade News” chart today, and the news is…mixed. The good news is that they added several phones to the list of guarantied ICS updates. Owners of the Motorola Photon 4G, Atrix 4G, Atrix 2, and the Electrify will all be getting a helping of Ice Cream Sandwich deliver as an OTA update some time…this year.

And that brings us to the not so good news. Verizon's phones are still being "evaluated", despite the fact that ICS information and even screen shots have leaked for the Droid RAZR and the Droid Bionic. And for those phones with official timelines, it looks like Motorola’s December announcement that they planned to update their current phones “in the next 4-6 months” may have been overly optimistic. Except for the WiFi “Google Experience” version of the Xoom, it appears that we are looking at Q2-Q3 for most Motorola devices to see some creamy Android 4.0 goodness sent their way.

This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise; Motorola’s recent comments on the difficulty of adapting ICS to hardware other than the reference SoC found in the Galaxy Nexus probably foreshadowed this prolonged timeline. Their comments didn’t fully square with our understanding of the process, but at the least it seems that Motorola has been having some difficulty in getting ICS prepped for other phones for weeks now.

At this rate Motorola’s new ICS handset, which we expect to be announced at MWC, may launch before any of their 2011 handsets are upgraded. Indeed, phones getting the update in Q3 may be just in time to see the next version of Android get released. Here’s hoping that Google’s pending acquisition of Motorola will lead to a sea change in how quickly these updates get out the door to end users.

source: Motorola via Droid-Life