Google engineer leaks first phone to get ICS as update

The Nexus S, Google’s powerful LTE smartphone, may be the first Android device already out in the market to receive the gift of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) as an update, this is according to (rapidly redacted) status updates from employees at the big G.

Hackers are also hard at work to get a version out for modders — more details below. Now, getting back to the Nexus S.

Google employees will test Ice Cream Sandwich internally before it filters down to the Galaxy Nexus S. This process is known as “Dogfooding”, and is essentially when employees wring out the bugs and issues in a product within a tightly controlled environment.

The tweets, Facebook status updates and Google+ posts are now cast asunder to the digital scrapyard, but screenshots were grabbed before the information was taken off the Internet. Google engineer Adel Saoud began with, “Just got Ice-cream Sandwich update on my Nexus S & it’s looking great”.

The testing phase is widely expected to take a month, with an over the air (OTA) update to follow upon completion.

Ice Cream Sandwich landed on devices such as the Galaxy Nexus, but only as a pre-loaded OS. Android 4.0 remains unavailable in many parts of the world. Thankfully, the release of the source code has led to various modding possibilities.

Many users, unable to wait for the official Android 4.0 update have taken to modding their phones. CyanogenMod are hard at work on CM9, the very unofficial build of Ice Cream Sandwich. If you are bold enough to run Android 4.0 on your Galaxy Nexus S or Samsung Galaxy S then the alpha and beta versions of CM9 can be respectively downloaded from the XDA-developers forum.

Android 4.0 is expected to appear first on devices such as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, HTC Vivid, Motorola Droid Razr and the wildly popular Samsung Galaxy S II.

* If you’re confused what’s going on here, the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus was the first phone to ship a few weeks ago with ICS. The ‘original’ Android phone was the Nexus from HTC in January 2010, then came the Nexus S from Samsung in December 2010, then the Galaxy Nexus in October. Now the Nexus S will become the first ICS upgrade to market.