Droid RAZR, Droid Bionic, Xoom (& Others?) to Get Ice Cream Sandwich in up to 6 Months From Now

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A few weeks ago we told you that Motorola confirmed that at least three of its existing Android devices, the Droid RAZR, the Droid Bionic and the Xoom tablets will be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich at some point in the future. The company promised it will offer more upgrade details after Google releases the source code of Ice Cream Sandwich, and now that we have them I can’t say we can by excited about Motorola’s ICS update schedule.

In fact, there are various annoying issues worth mentioning. First of all, Motorola is not saying anything about other Android devices. And the company launched quite a few Android handsets in 2011, alone which would probably be able to handle ICS. Similarly, some of its 2010 devices should play nice with Android 4.0. In other words, the fragmentation continues, at least for now, as ICS doesn’t appear to become the savior Android platform Eric Schmidt was talking about earlier today.

Those of you that have a qualifying device, therefore a RAZR, Bionic or a Xoom tablet, will be “happy” to hear the ICS update is coming in 3 to 6 months from now. In other words, by the time some of you will get to test Android 4.0 on your devices Apple could very well announce the main features of next year’s iOS 6:

3. Submit the upgrade to the carriers for certification

This is the point in the process where the carrier’s lab qualifies and tests the upgrade. Each carrier has different requirements for phases 2 and 3. There may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months.

3.5 Perform a Customer pre-release

We may perform some customer testing before a final release is delivered publicly to our user base

Sure, Motorola hopes to upgrade as many phones as possible, but we’ll have to wait some more to get more actual facts from the manufacturer. And considering Moto’s official response regarding the highly-anticipated Android 4.0 roll-out, we can only assume that other Android device makers will have a similar update schedule for some of their handsets and tablets.