14 DAY TRIAL // HTC Desire HD owners were promised an Ice Cream Sandwich a few months ago, but to their desperation the Taiwanese handset manufacturer backtracked and officially announced that this smartphone won't be getting an Android 4.0 upgrade.
The first to come forward with bad news on the ICS update for Desire HD was Canadian carrier TELUS. Although we thought that only the carrier-bounded Desire HD will be stuck on Gingerbread, HTC issued a short statement and confirmed the information.
HTC explained at that time that after extensive testing the company felt that the current version of HTC Sense UI is more than enough to offer customers the best experience on the smartphone.
“When we consider new versions of software, we weigh a number of factors, but ultimately the customer experience on the product is the deciding factor. We apologize for any confusion this change may have caused our customers.”
From what we could understand from HTC's short statement, it looks like the Desire HD with Android 4.0 ICS would not offer a smooth user experience, though the reasons were not unveiled.
Today, HTC felt the need to further explain Desire HD owners the reasons behind its decision not to offer an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade after all.
According to HTC “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.”
Furthermore, the company thinks that while this might not be such a big thing for tech-savvy, most HTC Desire HD would consider it unacceptable. We're not sure how the company reached that conclusion but here is what it had to say:
“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.”