Android Ice Cream Sandwich running on NovaThor U8500

Last week saw the release of Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich source code. Here at ST-Ericsson we were excited to see how quickly our Android upgrade team could get it up and running on NovaThor dual-core platforms designed to power high-performance smartphones and tablets.

Happily we found that thanks to our cumulative experience from previous Android upgrades, good preparation, a dedicated team and some round the clock work, we were able to do it in just a few days and had the demos below running before the end of the first week.

Speed and efficiency when upgrading Android does not come for free and we identified a few things that are key to this:

• Clearly structured way of working with our patch-set (clear guidelines, extensive source code patch reviews etc.).
• Avoidance of unnecessary changes in Android and a structured way of working in contributing necessary changes to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
• Identify and anticipate as much of the work as possible (With Android Upgrades planned well in advance).
• Follow up after each Android Upgrade with “lessons learned” in order to fine tune and identify actions that will further improve our Android upgrade efficiency.

Below you find four video clips that show the progress:

• The first clip The first clip is showing the UI and the ICS / kernel version.
• The second clip is showing web browsing using the built-in HSPA+ 3G modem with modem integration and data call working perfectly
• The third clip is showing music playback with audio in Spotify using the built-in HSPA+ 3G modem, in addition to a telephony voice call (including audio)
• The last clip show how making a small modification to ICS to use software GL from Vishal Bhoj, Linaro engineer Mathieu Poirier was able to get ICS running on the Snowball board.

As you can see it looks really good and we look forward to seeing this soon on real devices.