Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet getting ICS in May

In an official blog post Lenovo has stated that its ThinkPad tablet will receive the long awaited Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich update sometime in May. Currently the tablet is stuck on Android 3.2 Honeycomb. According to the blog-post the update will come in the form of an OTA. There are some interesting things we noted about the blog post.  Notably Lenovo is not talking about the main revamped Android UI introduced in ICS, but rather it is talking about improved browser performance, voice input and Face unlock, with the latter being slightly buggy. Unfortunately for Lenovo ,Google only yesterday announced a version of Chrome for Android ICS.
This pretty much confirms our apprehensions about customizations on top of the stock ICS UI which, in it current form is very fluid. Lenovo will in all likelihood customize the UI according to its own tastes, which is unfortunate, though pretty much the industry norm. Ever since Android has exploded on the market, OEMs have sought to differentiate the software experience on their devices via customized Android skins. While some of these skins indeed do add some value to the product more often than not, the skin slow down the core user experience and also delay Android updates as once Google pushes out an updates to the OEM, the OEM has to further implement its software changes to the OS.

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