Same here, I bought into the Nexus One hype, great phone but without ICS we are left high and dry with an expensive paperweight with regards to something like Chrome on ICS.

Unfortunately, because of shortsightedness from both Google and HTC (HTC mostly), phones back then only had like 450 MB internal storage, and from that only 250 MB were for the OS itself.

This means an ICS install would be severely limited by the hardware (I think a full ICS install is significantly bigger). Modders might be able to put ICS on it by cutting apps and features, or doing other kinds of hacks to extend the internal storage, but for Google that just wasn't worth it.

I would really blame HTC for this. Pretty much all of their phones throughout 2010 were like that. It was my main frustration with HTC at the time, another one being the weak Adreno 200 GPU.

Is it HTC or Google's responsibility to provide future-proof reference designs and specs?

HTC

"Future Proofing" a phone is difficult, because a manufacture needs to overspec the phone whilst still keeping it at a reasonable price.

HTC is notorious for underspecing storage on their phones. Other manufactures do not have the same problem.

Considering only 1% of android phones are capable of running ICS, I gotta blame it on the OS designer, not a reference hardware manufacturer.

In this case it is Google's responsibility.

There are ICS builds you can install on an N1 if you are willing to repartition your NAND (the stock partition layout can't fit ICS). Look here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1411429

Root and install a 4.0 rom!

I ran 4.0 via Cyanogenmod 9 on my Nexus S 4G for weeks, and unfortunately the bugs and constant app crashes got so bad that, as much as it pained me to do so, I went back to 2.3 yesterday. I love Android 4.0, but there doesn't seem to be a good, stable implementation of it yet.

Example issues:

  * Random reboots
  * Choppy playback in the Music app 
    (Amazon MP3 worked fine)
  * Random app crashes, particularly 
    games (possibly due to lack of official 
    4.0 support)
  * Poor GPS performance, occasionally taking 
    15-20 minutes to acquire a position (typically 
    solved more quickly by rebooting, but it takes
    several minutes to know there's a problem in the 
    first place)

It's difficult to blame the app crashes on the OS if the app doesn't claim to officially support 4.0, but that's still reason enough to wait.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day that CM9 is released, or MIUI releases their official 4.0 version, but until then I think it's better to stick with what works.

Edit: Formatting.

I've had ICS on my Nexus S for a few months now and I've not seen issues like that. I'm just using the standard Google image (AFAIK, my brother did the upgrade for me - Android 4.0.3, kernel 3.0.8-gb55e9ac). I do see a lot of battery drain when I'm using the GPS, and I don't play games, but no crashes.

I've been using this ROM on my NS4G for about a month:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1364221

In my experience, the stability and performance of various peripherals like GPS and the WiMax radio are about as good as the stock 2.3 ROM. I haven't even noticed a change in battery drain...

I'm running the same ROM on a NS4G also for about a month. It feels like a new phone and has been awesome in every way.

Have any good ROM suggestions? I'm looking for one somebody with first hand use of it can sell me on.

Definitely CynanogenMod. Probably (I haven't checked them all) the most complete and best testet Rom out there. Available for nearly every major Android hardware.

If you have a Droid X and can live without the camera, EncounterICS is unbelievably good.

It is very phone specific for ICS right now. When Cyanogen 9 comes out there will be more 'standardization.' For now, I'd look up the dev forum for your phone on xda-developers and see if there are any good options.

There is only an alpha 1 version of 4.0 (CM9, in fact) out for my phone, and it still has severe bugs.