no ice cream love for DROID 3

[AOEO]

The Motorola Droid 3 is almost a year old and has only received one official update from Verizon/Motorola and sadly is not on the official Ice Cream Sandwich list from either Motorola or Verizon. So why is a new phone that is not even a year old and only had one update not on this update list? To sum it up RAM.

A recent blog post by a very popular Android developer, who goes by Hashcode, explains this very well. The Droid 3 uses the Texas Instruments OMAP4 processor. The Gingerbread code for the Droid 3 uses very little RAM while Ice Cream Sandwich reserves 320MB of RAM just for HD codecs which would not leave enough RAM for the operating system.

Most people would wonder why the memory mappings couldn’t be changed to overcome the lack of RAM. The problem with this possible solution is that Motorola uses Texas Instruments code as a base. In their code there are numerous sources where 1GB of RAM is hard coded. To complicate things even more the Ducati HD codec processor used in the Droid 3 is also hard coded to use 1GB of RAM.

The only way to overcome this issue is if Motorola were to completely redesign the kernel used for the Droid 3. As fast as the market moves and the number of devices that Motorola maintains, this is very unlikely. The only OMAP4 device with 512MB of RAM running an official release of Ice Cream Sandwich is the Archos Gen9 80 tablet. This is because they developed a completely different way to manage memory in Ice Cream Sandwich.

There are currently Ice Cream Sandwich ports for the Droid 3 with limited HD codec and camera support. The reason there are issues with codecs and camera support is because Ice Cream Sandwich handles the codecs differently than the current Gingerbread kernel and therefor will never work completely on the Gingerbread kernel.

The only way the Droid 3 will ever see a fully working version of Ice Cream Sandwich is if the kernel is completely rewritten or if a developer can successfully load kernel modules to overcome the lack of RAM.


I don't know what kind of effort is needed to rewrite a kernel, but I wish people would stop spamming Android phones and take care of the ones that AREN'T EVEN a YEAR old. I happen to own a DROID 3 (my luck) and while it's deactivated (I use a different phone, my droid is using WiFi) I still wish I could upgrade to ICS, the HP touchpad (was discontinued after 7 weeks, and was only available in Australia for 3 days before it was discontinued) can have ICS if I wanted to add it. And it's one and a half years old.



(original source from: No Ice Cream Love For The Droid 3 )

[tjk629]

Interesting. I wonder how this effects phones running other CPUs like SnapDragon.

[guidot]

This entire post is on Hashcode's blog.

http://blog.hash-of-codes.com/2012/06/11/droid-3-to-be-or-not-to-be-icsd-47-2/

He is the only reason we know this much.

[AOEO]

Wow, he has a well written blog/post. I didn't even know that was around.