HTC Offers Explanation on Lack of ICS for the Desire HD

The seemingly never-ending tale of the Ice Cream Sandwich update for the HTC Desire HD has added yet another chapter.

Owners of the HTC Desire HD originally received a bit of a surprise when the manufacturer announced that the single-core device would be amongst those that would get updated to Android 4, Ice Cream Sandwich.   Three months later, however, things didn't look as promising.  That was until the next day when things were looking up yet again … and five days later it was officially canceled.

Does no one in this world realize you shouldn't toy with the emotions of smartphone owners?

HTC has now taken to its official blog to explain the reasoning behind the cancelation.

We've heard your feedback on our decision not to update the HTC Desire HD to Android 4.0. We completely understand that this is a controversial decision.

For more background, due to how storage on the HTC Desire HD is partitioned – and the larger size of Android 4.0 – it would require re-partitioning device storage and overwriting user data in order to install this update. While technically advanced users might find this solution acceptable, the majority of customers would not. We also considered ways to reduce the overall size of the software package, but this would impact features and functionality that customers are currently using. Even after installing the update, there were other technical limitations which we felt negatively impacted the user experience.

We believe an update should always improve the user experience and carefully evaluate each update based on this criteria. While we are very aware of the disappointment from this decision, we believe the impact to user experience was too great. We recognize this is a change from our previous statement and for that we're truly sorry.

While the explanation is sure to not thrill all of those who had been looking forward to the update, we do have to say that it makes some sense. If it was not going to enhance the experience of using the phone, then why go through with it? There are custom ROMs out there for those who desperately want to get ICS on to their Desire HD, but for the vast majority of consumers out there with the device, it looks like you have reached the end of the line for operating system updates.

[via HTC]