The phone should taste Ice Cream Sandwich in the second quarter of 2012

Mar 19, 2012 08:04 GMT  ·  By

Owners of a Galaxy Note smartphone from Samsung are waiting for the release of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich platform for their devices, but it appears that it might take a while before that happens.

In the meantime, however, they can take advantage of a series of enhancements that the South Korean mobile phone maker came up with for the Android device.

These improvements are being delivered to handsets in the form of a new firmware update, which is already being delivered to the international version of the Samsung Galaxy Note (GT-N7000).

Based on the Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread operating system, the new software update will bring the radio on the phone up to version XXLB2, while upgrading the Samsung software on the handset to XXLC1.

The new update for the Galaxy Note weighs 40MB and arrives on devices over-the-air. It brings along some bug fixes for editing videos on the world’s largest Android smartphone.

According to the guys over at Android Central, the new software update fixes some issues that the smartphone was previously plagued with.

Among them, we can count the fact that there were artifacts introduced in lower frame rate clips when working with videos that featured different frame rates.

Basically, the new update improves the phone’s video editing application. In addition to the said bug fix, it also resolves an issue with applying the "fade" transition effect with certain video files (which also caused the appearance of the said artifacts).

For what it’s worth, this update might be preparing the road for the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy Note.

Initially, Samsung promised the update for the first quarter of the year, but it appears that it had to delay it to the next quarter. Q2 should kick off in less than two weeks, and Samung’s announcement on the availability of ICS for this handset could arrive soon afterwards.