Ice Cream Sandwich runs well on Nexus S
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Yesterday we showed you how to install Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a Nexus S — and now we have a hands-on video of ICS running on Google’s superphone of yesteryear (embedded below). If you’ve already seen a video review of the Galaxy Nexus, you won’t be too surprised by what you see — but if you’re curious about how ICS will work on older phones, or if you own a Nexus S but you’re holding off for an official build, then you might find the video very interesting indeed.
Basically, the 1GHz Hummingbird processor (Cortex-A8 + SGX 540 GPU) found inside the Nexus S is more than strong enough to power Ice Cream Sandwich — but, unsurprisingly, it isn’t quite as smooth as the Galaxy Nexus. The framerate isn’t quite as high, and so instead of totally-smooth transitions and icon jiggles, it’s sometimes slightly choppy. As you can see in the video, though, it’s still very usable — and only marginally less snappy than Gingerbread. For a custom, non-official build, ICS on the Nexus S is very impressive.
It’s important to note that the Nexus S is only a year old, though — and its hardware spec, along with its doppelganger the Samsung Galaxy S, was market-leading at the time; you would expect Windows 7 to run fine on a computer that’s three or four years old, so why not Android? Regardless, the performance of ICS on the Nexus S indicates that the Galaxy S 1 & 2 should run ICS perfectly, as should its contemporaries — HTC Desire HD, the Droid X2 — and any recently-released smartphone (Razr, Bionic, and so on).The excellent performance of ICS on the Nexus S does cast a little doubt over Google’s claim that the Nexus One is too old for Android 4.0, however; the One’s hardware isn’t that slow. As we have covered before, this might simply come down to the lack of ROM space rather than raw grunt. It’s a shame, though: The Nexus One is just two years old, and a lot of people still use it — or one of the many phones based on its hardware spec (HTC Desire, HTC Evo 4G, Droid Incredible) — and ICS is sodifferent from its predecessors.
The first minute of the video is part of the installation process — skip it, if you just want to see what ICS looks and feels like on the Nexus S. Face Unlock isn’t shown, by the way, but it does work.