[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mr72:
All of these "I can't believe it takes so long for them to release ICS" posts are kind of missing the point. It is not really in the interest of AT&T to do an update, and they are likely slowing it down, not Pantech. AT&T makes modifications to Android as well as pushing in their bloatware in order to produce a branded device that enforces their marketing objectives, and while AOSP Android releases come out way ahead, AT&T has no motivation to allow those to be delivered onto their branded handsets. In fact, it is only a very slim minority of AT&T customers who even notice that there is a new release, and unfortunately AT&T is going to sort of passively force the update onto everyone and then they are going to have to field a whole host of complaints from customers who find the "updated" phone is slower, their favorite app no longer works, they don't know how to use the new features and the old thing is gone, they don't like the new colors, why did you break my phone when I didn't ask for it, etc. And that's assuming AT&T has already completed all of their testing to ensure that the new OS works as well as the old so they don't wind up putting something out with regression bugs. This is not to mention them having to come up with new ways to prevent us hackers from gaining root access and unlocking the bootloader.

From a marketing perspective, AT&T has pretty much zero reason to allow an ICS or JB or Krispy Kreme (or whatever the heck the new Android will be) to go out to their phones until there is identified some major problem that is solved with the new release, which outweighs the tremendous risk they take by allowing the new release to go out. Since they don't have throngs of people forcibly returning nonfunctional Bursts which have known architechture bugs that make them unusable but are obviously fixed in ICS, there really is no reason for AT&T to push out the update.

In short, you bought the phone with Gingerbread and likely signed a contract. AT&T is under no obligation nor motivation to provide you an ICS update. As far as they are concerned, you bought a feature phone whose features are provided by the particular build of Android provided at the point of sale, and there is the end of their obligation to support updates. When your contract is up you can choose another phone with ICS or JB or whatever you like, then you will be stuck with that.

My wife just recently got a Sony Xperia Ion, which also has GB on it, and it just came out. You want to complain about Pantech? How about Sony! But that phone was very slick and except for the fact that my wife was hooked on some of the features of HTC Sense, she'd have kept it. She replaced it in a couple of weeks with a HTC One X, which has ICS. But that's the latest and greatest from HTC, still with a year-old OS on it.

The fact is that GB works great on these phones and even for the hackers there is no compelling reason to change besides your desire to tinker or have the latest thing. If you want a phone that is going to have heavy support from CM and always have a ton of ROMs I suggest you sell the Burst and drop $650 on a HTC One X or a Samsung GS3. No offense, but you get what you pay for. If you want bigtime dev community support, get the absolutely most popular phone. You have a fringe market phone, and while it may have killer specs and be very reliable and the only dual-core 1.5GHz Android phone you can buy that will actually fit in your pocket, it is still very unpopular so you are pretty lucky just to have root and be able to debloat it.

Just to be clear, if CM9 or CM10 for Burst shows up, I'll take it in a heartbeat. But it makes no sense at all to rag on Pantech for dragging their feet releasing something that has absolutely no revenue in it and is a pure cost and risk endeavor to them with no upside. I am sure they would be delighted if they ticked off the noob hacker wannabes who constantly complain and demand something for nothing so those folks will never buy another Pantech product. They'd probably pay most of us to go away and buy a Samsung instead and happily lose that 0.1% market share.