My better half has had her HTC Desire Sensation mobile update to the new android operating system 4.03 “Ice cream sandwich” and she’s not a happy Easter bunny!!
Apart from “Why change it if it ain’t broke” and “I wish they’d tell me the differences before it installs” and “Why can’t I go back to the old version” I’d say she took it quite well :?
So far, apart from having to learn it all over again, the main bug bear is that you can no longer have the notification volume different from the ringer volume. Seems like a backward step to me!
After seeing the “upgrade” I’m now investigating “rooting” my phone (HTC Desire HD) so I can back up the ROM, just in case I suffer the same misfortune.
Thought you all ought to know
It took a good hour and a half to root my phone ( I had to downgrade it first ) but it went smoothly enough and now I can keep the version of Android I like, save it and also use other network sims.
I’m Not sure if it’s worth it yet. But for any out there wanting to do the same, then go for it - just read the instructions as there is a risk of “bricking” your phone. I did find a you tube video to help but I did need to read the manuals as well.
All four of my Android devices are rooted. I mainly did so in order to use the ‘recovery’ modules that are much more versatile and useful than the stock recovery that came with the devices. The main advantage of these recoveries is the ability to backup the device COMPLETELY before modifying the firmware, a procedure that many times requires a ‘reset’ of the device to factory settings and therefore wipes all programs and user data from its memory. Backup involves copying all of this information to a memory card, either internal or external, so that the device can be restored it the ‘update’ turns out to be dysfunctional. There are techniques available to preserve the root through this process, but they don’t always work. There is a website with fora devoted to software development on android devices, http://forum.xda-developers.com/, and chances are that unless your device has just come to market there are people there who have rooted your device, ‘bricked’ it, and recovered it. I’ve bricked a couple of my devices–at first it gets the adrenalin flowing, but once the unbricking instructions are found and successfully followed, they functioned normally again. 
I know I’m a geek so I always upgrade as soon as it’s possible, but I recommend others do it when they get a chance rather than resisting change. The tech world always moves incrementally onwards, so if you force yourself to stay on v1 of a product when it can be upgraded to v2, the chances are when you next upgrade your hardware you’ll find it has v3 on it and you have a big learning curve from v1 to v3 rather than just a smaller step from v2 to v3.
As an example, at work we used Windows/NT on our desktop PC. When we upgraded to Windows XP someone thought it would be a good idea to set it into Windows/NT mode so that the users wouldn’t be confused by the new XP look. Of course the less tech-savvy users never found the switch to put it into XP mode, so now as we’re about to upgrade to Windows 7 we have a group of users who are used to seeing NT and a lot of changes between that and Windows 7. The unfortunate thing is that those users are the people who are less computer literate and will find the big change much more difficult to handle.
Finally…both my Android devices are ICS. I didn’t find it very much different from Gingerbread (my last phone) or Honeycomb (as my tablet was before it got the ICS upgrade). The only current downside with ICS is that it doesn’t seem 100% stable on all devices. My phone seems better since the last OTA upgrade, but my tablet is still not 100% stable despite being on v4.0.4.
I spent better part of day trying to root my inc 1. Couldn’t make it happen. Didn’t brick it either. Just could never get s-off.
my droid x updated sunday and I noticed that all sorts of things that hadn’t been running were up and pulling data and the battery drained quickly. I closed them down quickly only to find they were back up . I did a battery pull and of course that was like running in the rain trying to push the drops back into the clouds.
Before Sunday’s update I would have about 70% battery at the end of the day, yesterday I had 40%. That sucks with not using it from 5am to 4 pm
So… I removed my task killer , put another in and something that saves the battery. I can’t wait to see how it is doing in 8 hours of riding around in my suit pocket at school.
Sometimes new and improved just isn’t good.
I can upgrade in November, so we shall wait for what else rolls my way
I usually put mine on a charger mid day at work. Battery life isn’t great.
I have ICS on my HP TouchPad and the battery life is pretty good - I have made sure I have logged out of Google Talk , that it seems is a big battery killer, prior to doing that the battery life was much worse than running webOS.
Having rooted my HTC Desire HD I wouldn’t go back as I can now use any sim in it and it seems perfectly stable. With the added advantage of being able to install additonal apps that require root access and not having to worry about HTC breaking it!
BTW A quote from a post on the XDA forum: “the first time you try to root your phone is quite a buttock clenching experience” is probably quite apt