Samsung has started to roll out Ice Cream Sandwich updates for its Galaxy Note smartphone/tablet/ phablet. The update, weighing in at over 300Mb, has been installed by several UK Note users who bought the phone SIM free. People were expecting this update in March but obviously it’s now late. ICS was unveiled in October last year and it’s been slow to get ported to user’s mobiles, if indeed it will even be made available for your particular smartphone/network combination.
Part of the delay in Samsung’s case is, we expect, due to the TouchWiz interface they merge into the operating system. Also with the Galaxy Note there are an additional suite of pen tools, apps and widgets which take time to program. Samsung has called these stylus friendly bits the “Premium Suite”. At launch the Galaxy Note had S Pen enabled apps including S Choice, S Planner and S Memo. New apps for in the Premium Suite for the Galaxy Note with ICS include the S Note app for note taking over web pages, maps and images and My Story to make digital greetings cards. The update is also supposed to bring performance improvements to the phablet.
Above in the video a (German) user compares side by side a Gingerbread Galaxy note (left)
with an updated ICS Galaxy Note (right).
If you are a Galaxy Note user and have not received an over-the-air update notification you can try and do it via Samsung Kies on your desktop computer. In this was several users have reported update successes.
The Samsung Galaxy Note has, since launch, confounded critics by selling well (over 5 million units sold by March this year) and doing so at a rather high price which is a plus for Samsung and hopefully will spur the company on to take more chances in being innovative and inventive. The ICS and Premium Suite update should make the Galaxy Note an even more attractive proposition to people who are interested in this in-between form factor smart connected device.
