By If you wanted to get an early look at Android 4.0 ICe Cream Sandwich for your HTC Sensation and Sensation XE, you’re in luck. HTC is starting an official early access program that will allow a limited amount of users to check out HTC Sense 4 and Android 4 before the masses.
While these builds won’t be considered final builds until HTC finishes development and testing (they might use the early access build if they’re good enough or will use an updated build if they’ve made any changes), they should be as close to the experience as you’ll get outside of the development community.
“HTC is doing something new and pretty cool in the coming days: we’ll be releasing an “early access preview” of our ICS upgrade for the Sensation and Sensation XE. This will be limited in scope (just a few hundred users and only in Europe) because we’re still scaling up back-end resources for general availability worldwide, and our hope is people will play with it and enjoy getting used to the ICS experience with Sense. We’ll be doing similar previews for other devices in the future, too.”
Some 200 users in Europe will be the only ones in on the fun for now, but hopefully HTC will increase the amount of users for the next early access previews they unleash. Yes, HTC will be doing this with most of their phones slated to get Android 4.0.
If you needed a reminder of which devices are confirmed to be getting the update, forward your attention to this post. We hope to get more information on the first rollouts for the HTC Sensation and Sensation XE soon. [via Android Community]
Oh quit teasing us HTC owners and finish up the development and testing so we can get our ICS on!
Nice move. Roll out with a test version for real users. Let them & their phones provide feedback regarding bugs. Clean up the final product and unleash it. Free control group.
This is getting to freaking complicated to do an android update! I’m gonna try to always stick with the nexus brand.
I’ve had ics for a while now on my sensation. it’s pretty smooth
Yea and one of them will do a system dump and post to xda and we’ll all have a preview :)
now thats how you do business. release it to a small percentage. have them test it out in day to day real world situations and tweak. lot less chance of releasing a BS update thats gonna get pulled and piss everyone off.
“HTC Sense 4 and Android 4 before the masses”
How do you know its Sense 4.0?
Because HTC Sensation XL and (I think) XE have Sense 3.5 and they were released since a while ago.
So pretty big chance that this will be Sense 4, which is quite a disappointment (dock-wise, older dock looked much better and more unique).
Just saw a rep on XDA say its definately NOT sense 4.0
They should do this for every update. I’d love to test for them as someone who is constantly using my smartphone.
Samsung have had 4 ICS leaks for the Galaxy S II series now. Xda have been testing + feedback ever since lastyear December.
Maybe htc are finally learning.
Likewise, there have been 4 ICS leaks for the sensation. I’m getting amazing radio performance, and when I had the leaked sense, it was quite smooth and bug free.