14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese handset manufacturer Huawei is the first to release an official Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for one of its Android smartphones. It looks like Huawei Honor owners can now download and install an Android 4.0 ROM that shows some of Google’s latest operating system’s new features.
Even though this is just a BETA release, it lets Huawei Honor owners experiment with some of the features that will be available in the final version of Ice Cream Sandwich. The Android 4.0 ROM can be downloaded from Huawei’s support site and has about 148 MB in size.
Unfortunately, the download speed is very slow due to the high traffic, which was to be expected given the fact that no other handset maker managed to offer its fans a stable Ice Cream Sandwich ROM until now.
It is also worth mentioning that Huawei also provides those who install the Android 4.0 (beta) ROM on their Huawei Honor devices, the option to rollback to Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
There’s also a set of instructions on how to install the beta version of Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as the whole process of rolling back to Gingerbread.
Huawei Honor is one the company’s high end Android smartphones and is powered by a 1.4 GHz single core Qualcomm MSM8255T Snapdragon processor. It packs 1 GB internal memory, 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of ROM and microSD card slot for memory expansion.
On a side note, Huawei delivered earlier last week another beta version of a Gingerbread ROM for Huawei Ideos X5. However, the ROM was pulled shortly after due to several bugs found and reported by Ideos X5 owners.
In the meantime, the Chinese handset maker replaced the Gingerbread ROM with another beta release, which, hopefully, ironed out some of the issues that were found in the previous version.
