Most of the Android that's out there is running on handsets.
Right now, all of the Honeycomb tablets currently in use which are due for the ICS upgrade only occupy about a 3.3% share of the total Android install base.
However, while existing Honeycomb tablet owners will see this software as a welcome improvement to what they were using before, I don't see Ice Cream Sandwich as being some sort of magic bullet that is suddenly going to propel Android tablets into major market share territory (with the one major exception being Amazon's Kindle Fire). The software runs considerably faster, the user interface is more responsive overall and the browser renders pages more fluidly, which has always been one of my major complaints about the OS. With the acknowledgement that what I'm playing with right now does have bugs and in no way should be considered a production software release or an officially supported build by Motorola, overall, Ice Cream Sandwich is definitely an improvement over Honeycomb. Unless you know what you're doing, I don't suggest going this route with your Android tablet.Ĭurrently, the three "team" builds I have looked at do not have functioning cameras/HDMI ports and have a number of other minor issues, but for the most part the aesthetics and general operation of the software more or less closely reflects what will end up being released within several weeks by Motorola as well as by other Android tablet OEMs. There are other community-supported unofficial ICS builds out for other tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Asus Transformer - all of which of course require "rooting" your device and installing ClockWorkMod on it, an open source firmware manager utility. Right now, all of the builds that are out from the community are essentially "Vanilla" based on code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) although they have a few additional tweaks for things such as overclocking if you really want to dive into that sort of stuff.
Motorola is reportedly now testing its official software release for their tablets with a pilot group of users, so that means if you own a XOOM, you should be receiving it via an over-the-air (OTA) update within a month. I've actually managed to try three separate ICS builds for the XOOM, just to get a sense of what stage the code is currently in. Motorola hasn't yet released the updated software for its tablet officially, but I was able to get the latest version of Android running due to work being done by various open source community teams at XDA-Developers, a popular forums site for Android development and hacking. For the last day, I've been tinkering around with Google's Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) 4.0.3 OS on my Motorola XOOM.