It looks as though all that whining may have finally paid off. In a tweet sent out by the @GoogleNexus twitter account, the big G announced to thunderous applause –
“Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3) update now rolling out to Nexus S and Nexus One. Be patient, may take a few weeks for OTA (Over The Air) to complete.”
We have yet to see any reports of the new update actually hitting anywhere, but I’m currently staring a hole in my Nexus One in the vain hope that I’ll be in the first batch of recipients.
This marks almost exactly two months since Gingerbread launched to the public, a slow turnaround by anyone’s standards, however this new update is said to alleviate some random rebooting behaviour Nexus S users have been seeing, so perhaps Google was anxious that the software be relatively bug-free before unleashing it on the Nexus One-toting masses.
Of course while Google have been taking their sweet time, the homebrew development community have been steaming ahead, successfully porting the next iteration of Android (Honeycomb or 3.0) onto the Nexus One, as well as releasing the next version of the eponymous Cyanogen Mod, which is largely based on Gingerbread.
The new update is also rolling out to the N1’s older brother, the Nexus S, and includes a number of tweaks to the NFC tagging system as well as fixing the aforementioned rebooting bug. There is also a slight change to the way Facebook contacts are handled on the Nexus S, namely that they will no longer integrate directly with the device’s phonebook. Google said in a statement that –
“Since Facebook contacts cannot be exported from the device, the appearance of integration created a false sense of data portability. Facebook contact data will continue to appear within the Facebook app.”
This is no doubt a reaction to the data privacy scuffle that Facebook and Google had last year in relation to exporting friend data from Facebook into Google and vice versa.
