(Image Source: AndroidOS.in)

BY JIM FLINK AND JJ BAILEY

Sorry Santa. No Ice Cream Sandwich to deliver this holiday season. Or anytime soon. At least for Galaxy S users.

On its Korean website -- Samsung says -- their most popular device won’t be getting the freshest OS.

Android and Me explains the decision -- and shares its disappointment with the news.

“Samsung has delivered a devastating blow, announcing that the original Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab will not be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich. Since the Galaxy S features the same hardware configuration as the Nexus S (which is currently receiving an OTA update to ICS), Samsung claims that the phone’s limited ROM and RAM are insufficient since they would not be able to fit TouchWiz, video calling software, and other various carrier services.”

The calamitous chorus was repeated over at The Verge.

“This will come as a massive blow to the great many users of the Galaxy S, who would have rightly expected the 1GHz Hummingbird processor and accompanying memory to be able to handle ICS — it's the same hardware as you'll find inside the Nexus S, and that phone is receiving Android 4.0 over the air right now.”

PCMag says, this is more than just a whiff on a product upgrade.
This has some more serious undertones.

“While the original Galaxy S wouldn't have qualified for Samsung's pledge to the Google Android Update Alliance this past May, it does underscore just how important that pledge was—which makes it all the more discouraging that the company danced around our question about Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades for several recent Samsung models, and if not, how the company would reconcile that with the pledge it made just seven months ago.”

And a broken promise has stung many -- who were anticipating the next big thing from Samsung.  Like the folks at GigaOm.

“I can understand that we’re looking at a smartphone and a tablet that debuted in 2010, and there’s a limited shelf life for future updates on mobile devices. What I don’t understand, nor accept really, is that the issue is Samsung’s user interface software. Even worse, I think Samsung is shooting itself in the foot.”

Finally, PCMag says, in the race for OS supremacy, Android is still struggling for one thing that it’s competitors already have: dependability.

It's almost never clear if your phone will ever get that upgrade—unlike with iOS or Windows Phones, which always get all upgrades (providing they meet the right hardware requirements). With Android, it seems to depend on the phone vendor, the specific model, the wireless carrier, the Android version itself, and whether Google sent the carrier an inflatable plastic food product as a token of its appreciation that week. Worse—and much to our chagrin—sometimes vendors make promises to customers before the sale that they don't keep once you own the phone.