Ice Cream Sandwich ported to Samsung Galaxy S II

By Mike Dunn Published November 18, 2011

It has been a busy week for the Android hacking community. On Monday Google released the source code for its latest version of Android, named Ice Cream Sandwich. Hackers have been able to successfully port ICS over to the popular Galaxy S II, in less than a week.

In the video below you will be able to see a semi-functional version of ICS running on a non-U.S. version of the Galaxy device. We are calling it a semi-functional version mostly because none of the radios work on the phone. That means that the phone doesn’t work as a phone and can’t connect to WiFi or Bluetooth. This mostly serves as a proof of concept, that it can be done, and will be done long before an official version of Ice Cream Sandwich are released for the phone.

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Astute viewers will also notice that the phone is displaying the software buttons, even though the Galaxy S II has physical buttons on the phone. In official versions of the software those virtual buttons will not be displayed. The makers of the video explain that they are working on removing them from their unofficial port, but haven’t done so yet.

Earlier this week we predicted that unofficial ports of ICS would start making their way to phones in a couple of weeks. Seeing as this is not a fully functional version our prediction is still on course. It is very likely that a stable and functional version of ICS will be out very soon.

If you are like the majority of Android users and do not want to risk this type of installation you will have to wait. All major phone companies are slowly rolling out their plans for which phones will be updated, and hopefully your phone is on the list of lucky phones getting the upgrade.

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