“Experience mobile life without carrier or Samsung overlays. Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich lets you customize your screen for faster access to the widgets you use most. Multitasking is no longer a chore with quicker access to notifications and recently used apps. Blazing web browsing and voice-controlled search lets you find what you are looking for, faster.” Yes, this is Samsung advertising against its own TouchWiz nonsense. No words.
We’re already on 4.2 with 4.3 around the corner.
If you’re after stock Android go with Nexus, not Samsung.
Wait, so now you’re unhappy that Samsung makes devices with stock Android? You people are hard to please.
Where am I saying I’m unhappy?
Your text doesn’t sound very positive, but I may well be wrong.
Thom isn’t complaining, he’s baffled at the fact that even Samsung is now advertising against their own software — how many other companies can you think that would do that?
I interpreted it as pleasant surprise, actually, because of Thom’s dislike of OEM overlays on top of Android and the unlikelihood of any OEM every saying ‘our overlay sucks’. Thom, am I right in guessing you don’t like TouchWiz any more than any of the other OEM’s crapware?
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-S730HKATFN-specs
Specs:
– 800 Mhz, single-core, Qualcomm S2 CPU.
– 320×480 resolution
Nice concept (stock Android), but such poor hardware.
Step 1: Create cheap, low-end phone for entry market
Step 2: Realise the phone is not powerful enough to run the Samsung-branded crap
Step 3: All negatives are positives. Marketing team come up with way to market low-end phone — it’s not overloaded with crap!
Step 4: Profit!
It depends. I doubt even stock ICS would run that well on such hardware either.
Maybe Samsung’s plan is to;
Step 1: Release low-end phone with crap display and low performance running stock Android.
Step 2: Con people into thinking that stock Android is only for crap hardware.
Step 3: People desire higher-end Galaxies with Samsung’s TurdPiss UI/Skin instead.
Step 4: Profit!!
Martyr device, basically.
Edited 2013-02-06 18:32 UTC
Huawei Ascend G300 seems to work pretty well.
Not sure that is what happened here.
Perhaps the phone is too cheap to dedicate resources to it.
Since I’m sure Step 1 of getting TouchWiz running on a phone is to get stock Android running on it… they probably just stopped at step 1.
The 14 months old, two revs back operating system should go nicely with the dated hardware. And you can be sure that you’ll never see an OS update for this one.
This phone is just a standard Galaxy Mini 2 (s6500) without any vendor crapware. It is an entry level $100 phone designed for the prepaid market. It will almost certainly be upgraded to Jelly Bean in future.
The hardware is more than adequate to run ICS. ICS will run on as little as 16MB of RAM.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp…
When I look in my Galaxy Nexus it says this:
61MB Settings
30MB Keyboard
14MB Maps
30MB Google services
So running this on a phone with less than 128MB would give you an iPhone1 experience.
Sony Xperia Pro (single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 @ 1 GHz, Adreno 205 GPU, 512 MB RAM although only 384 MB available to OS) runs Android 4.0.4 … just barely. This SoC is one step above the Galaxy Discover (MSM8xxx vs MSM7xxx).
Android 2.3.4 ran beautifully on this SoC, usually with 80-100 MB of RAM free after boot, and 30-40 MB after starting GMail, Opera Mobile, Contacts, XDA, and Google Reader.
Android 4.0.4 has nicer apps, but boots with only 20-30 MB of free RAM, and quickly drops down to 5-10 MB after starting a handful of apps.
Android 4.0 uses a lot more RAM than 2.3.
The only reason 4.0 may run well on this Galaxy device is due to the screen resolution being so low.
Edited 2013-02-07 19:44 UTC
Samsung the giant company can’t oversee, approve, or even understand everything it puts out. The guy that did it was probably just some guy that hates touchwiz as much as we do. Now that its getting attention, he might end up with a pink slip.
A friend of mine in her late 70s has just got her first ever mobile phone. Her family convinced her to buy an iPhone 5 on a two year contract. The phone will only be used for calls and the occasional text. When I politely suggested that a basic feature phone probably would have been just as effective I was sharply corrected with a “it’s got 4G” comment. I almost laughed – the owner had no idea what 4G even meant.