At
this point we shouldn’t be more than a month and a half away from the Samsung
Galaxy Note official Android 4.0 ICS update, but how about getting a little
preview of what’s to come?
The first ICS 4.0.3 ROM for the phoneblet just
leaked and we even managed to install in on a Note we had lying around and test
it.
As
you will see in a bit, the ROM is really stable and snappy and seems good enough
for everyday use. All the hardware is supported, including the S Pen.
However,
since it’s a Chinese release it comes without support for a Google account,
which means no Android Market, so maybe it would be best if you wait for the
official release or at least another leak.
Of
course, one of the greatest bits about Android is that you can easily sideload
apps, but you don’t want to be doing that all the time.
Even
though TouchWiz masks most of the visual changes that Android 4.0 brings,
there’s plenty of new functionality here. The new web browser is a huge
improvement in terms of both speed and functionality over the Gingerbread one,
while the new recent task screen is both easy to use and nice to look at.
The
notification area has also seen some modifications, including the helpful
feature to remove notification by side-swipes. It also seems Samsung will have
a couple of nice surprises for us. While digging into the setting mode we
noticed two new options – the first of those enables the displaying of the
battery percentage over its icon, while the other improves one-hand usability
of the Note by making keyboards use just a part of its screen.
Sadly, the
one-hand thingy only works in the calculator for now, while the battery
percentage is not functional at all. The S Pen gestures are all here though,
even though it’s a bit sad that the cool stylus got no new functionality.
If you want
to give the ICS ROM a try, you should check out this topic over at the
XDA-developers forum. The files required for the flashing are all there for the
taking and you might find some helpful tips too.
As usual,
impressions and questions are more than welcome in the comment section below.
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