Ice Cream Sandwich officially NOT coming to the Motorola Photon 4G

As of the moment, the latest version of the Android operating system is Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This was unveiled a couple of months back at Google I/O and is expected to land on most of the high-end devices in the market today. In fact, it already had on several of them such as the Samsung Galaxy S III for smartphones and on the ASUS Transformer Prime for tablets. This is a good thing really, because it shows that manufacturers are putting extra effort in giving their devices a taste of Android’s latest and greatest.

However exciting this may be, it still is sad to see that some handsets will never get cranked up to Jelly Bean, Even sadder still is that other smartphones on the other hand are still waiting to get a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the predecessor of Jelly Bean. The worst case scenario however is for some handsets to get promised the ICS update only to find out that the update has been cancelled and they will be stuck in the Gingerbread generation until they reach EOL (End of Life) status.

Such is the sorry state of the Motorola Photon 4G.

Looking back, Motorola has put up an ICS upgrade schedule so users of Motorola handsets can check back every once in a while to see how the ICS development for their respective devices is going so far. Just last week, Motorola made several changes to its roadmap wherein the supposed Q3 ICS rollout schedule for the Motorola Photon 4G was changed to “Further plans coming soon.” Sad to say, that is not the end of the story.

Just recently, Motorola has again revised its ICS upgrade schedule and this time around, the manufacturer confirmed that the previously-promised Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update is no longer coming to the Motorola Photon 4G. Even sadder still is the fact that the handset with its dual-core capabilities courtesy of its NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset is perfectly more than capable enough of handling ICS.

With this development in play, that bumpy, confusing road to ICS for the Motorola Photon 4G comes to an end – a tragic one, at that.

As for the Motorola Photon 4G, the handset is still a capable smartphone to begin with despite losing that chance to get a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It has its circuitry built around its NVIDIA Tegra 2 AP20H chipset which basically brings into play a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 1GHz and a full gigabyte of RAM. The handset has 16GB of onboard storage with the option for memory expansion made possible by its microSD card slot. In terms of its display, the Motorola Photon 4G packs a 4.3-inch TFT panel protected by Gorilla Glass with a 540 x 960 qHD resolution while its dual-shooter configuration includes a rear 8MP shooter and a front VGA camera for video calls and self-portraits.