Ice Cream Sandwich Updates: AT&T Announces More Updates Coming For Motorola, Samsung Smartphones

More ICS for AT&T? OK!

AT&T put out a press release on Thursday to announce that more of its handsets would be getting Android 4.0, or "Ice Cream Sandwich," in the near future.

Ice Cream Sandwich has already begun to roll out to AT&T customers with the HTC Vivid, and "in the coming months" (nothing more specific than that) the following Android smartphones and tablets on AT&T will be getting ICS:

• LG Nitro
• Motorola ATRIX 2
• Motorola ATRIX 4G
• Pantech Burst
• Pantech Element
• Samsung Captivate Glide
• Samsung Galaxy Note
• Samsung Galaxy S II
• Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9

Congratulations, owners of those devices! Better luck next time, owners of the HTC Inspire, Sharp FX Plus, Pantech Crossover and HTC Status!

Now, we do have a little more information about a couple of these devices. Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy S II has already started rolling out in global markets; those hoping for a visual overhaul will be disappointed, as Galaxy S II with ICS looks just like the Galaxy S II with Gingerbread. Samsung also recently announced a slight delay for Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy Note "phablet" as the company designs new applications especially for the S-Pen stylus. Android 4.0 should be hitting the Galaxy Note some time between April and May.

Motorola's published timeline, meanwhile, calls for both the Atrix 2 and the Atrix 4G to get Ice Cream Sandwich some time in Q3 2012, or between July and September.

U.S. smartphones getting Ice Cream Sandwich later, often months after, their identical counterparts in Europe and Asia has become a trend in this round of updates; GigaOM's Kevin Fitchard has suggested that this is due to the additional time it takes to integrate the applications that carriers like AT&T and Verizon pre-load on their smartphones. Motorola notes that Ice Cream Sandwich availability depends to some extent on murky "carrier requirements."

Whatever those "carrier requirements" are, they appear to be more stringent in the U.S. than they are elsewhere. With Android 5.0 (codenamed "Jelly Bean") apparently around the corner, those carriers better hustle up and push out some updates.

For more on upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich updates, check out HTC's plans here, Verizon's plans here, and Motorola's complete plans here.

Need a reminder on what's so great about Ice Cream Sandwich? Check out a bunch of the new features, introduced by Google in October, below.