Carriers and device manufacturers have been messing up Android since the beginning. Not simply content with a free operating system good enough to immediately allow them to compete with Apple, they have abused Android’s open source nature and adapted the OS, and mostly for the worse. In the U.S., smartphones routinely come packed with crapware and have some features of the Android operating system, such as tethering or mobile hotspot, disabled.
All of this meddling not only hurts the Android brand, it also fractures the Android operating system. Manufacturers are slow to upgrade Android software on phones that have already been released, meaning frustration. While Google has just announced that Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will be launched later this month on the Nexus 7 tablet, most smartphones don’t yet have Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
One of those smartphones is Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Samsung has promised an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich for owners of the ultra-large Note smartphone, but have delayed the release for months, though the international version of the phone has it. Many of the features Samsung has dangled in front of Galaxy Note owners are features that owners of Samsung’s Galaxy S III got with their purchase.
This week, just when it finally looked as if Galaxy Note owners were going to get Android 4.0, Samsung dropped the ball. According to a Gizmodo report, some Note owners in France are having their smartphone crash or even become completely bricked by the update.
France was one of the first places to receive the Galaxy Note Ice Cream Sandwich update. Samsung has acknowledged the problem through its Facebook page, where the company is urging its customers to fill out a detailed form on the problem so that it can do some much-needed debugging.
Take a look at the video below to see all of the features Samsung is promising its customers, then ponder whether the software is worth waiting countless months for an upgrade to the newest version of Android: