Two-year-old phone receives 15-month-old software update

If you bought Verizon's first 4G phone, start checking for updates now: the carrier has finally approved the Android 4.0 update (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) for the HTC Thunderbolt. The only problem? The Thunderbolt has been on the market since March of 2011, and Ice Cream Sandwich came out seven months later in October—not exactly a great turn-around time.

For anyone still using a Thunderbolt, it's nice that the phone is being updated at all rather than being fated to run Gingerbread forever, as has been the case for so many other phones. But the Thunderbolt's update still sums up pretty much everything that's wrong with the Android ecosystem's ever-worsening software fragmentation problems: this phone is still two major updates behind the current release of Android, and it's only receiving the update as the first customers who bought the phone on a two-year contract are becoming eligible for a new phone anyway.