Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0 on the HTC Vivid Video Review

Nexus S owners, sometimes life just isn't fair. You've been waiting months for your helping of Ice Cream Sandwich, and HTC and ATT beat you to it, with the Android OS 4.03 upgrade for the HTC Vivid. Now, the Vivid is a fine phone with a 1.2GHz dual core Snapdragon CPU, a sharp qHD display and LTE 4G, and we're glad to see it get the upgrade. Heck, at this point, we're thrilled to see any Android phone get an official OTA update to ICS. The Vivid is $99 on contract with AT&T and $450 without a contract. It's also known as the HTC Holiday (code name) and the HTC Raider overseas.



In this video we check out what's new in Ice Cream Sandwich and HTC Sense 3.6. It's worth watching if you have any HTC phone that's been promised the ICS upgrade, because you'll see how HTC has customized ICS to look a little more like Gingerbread in some places (for ease of use on a phone, that might not be a bad thing). In fact, if you own a Samsung or LG Android smartphone that will get ICS, it's worth watching, because you'll see how far Google allows manufacturers to go in customizing Ice Cream Sandwich (farther than I though they'd allow). Now, I actually like what HTC has done, and I still enjoy HTC Sense, but if you don't, there are third party launchers that can get you a more vanilla ICS experience on the Vivid.