August 16th, 2012 
Android 
A few weeks ago, we reported on HTC’s disappointing decision not to provide an official Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Desire HD. Not even a petition with over 15,000 signatures was enough to persuade them to change their mind. It did however, force them to release an official statement:
We’ve heard your feedback on our decision not to update the HTC Desire HD to Android 4.0. We completely understand that this is a controversial decision.
For more background, due to how storage on the HTC Desire HD is partitioned – and the larger size of Android 4.0 – it would require re-partitioning device storage and overwriting user data in order to install this update. While technically advanced users might find this solution acceptable, the majority of customers would not. We also considered ways to reduce the overall size of the software package, but this would impact features and functionality that customers are currently using. Even after installing the update, there were other technical limitations which we felt negatively impacted the user experience.
We believe an update should always improve the user experience and carefully evaluate each update based on this criteria. While we are very aware of the disappointment from this decision, we believe the impact to user experience was too great. We recognize this is a change from our previous statement and for that we’re truly sorry.
As we know, the developers here on XDA are never ones to let things lie. XDA Senior member QD2DC and the Team blackout development team have now given HTC a large two fingered salute by releasing the first fully functional Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich ROM with Sense 3.6. Ported over from an HTC Incredible S build, the ROM is 100% complete and has no known issues. The ROM also comes with Team blackout’s own custom kernel for additional performance.
If you’d like to give the ROM a try, head on over to the original thread.
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XDA dev’s once again kicked HTC’s a** and showed them this is how it works and please don’t give us nonsense reasons inorder to abandon a premium product. If you(HTC a**holes) can’t do it then we(XDA dev’s – the genius minds) can do it and did it better than you thought of.
@speed_pour: If you mean ROMs like IceColdSandwich – they were/are running on Kernel 2.6.35 and there is no 720p video etc pp. As far as I’m concerned there are only two fully working ICS ROMs, namely Virtuous Infinity and the one by team blackout.
However, this news says team blackout were the first ones to do it – correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t team virtuous the first team to release a fully working ICS ROM for Desire HD? They at least made the first 3.0 Kernel – but if it’s important to mention that blackout did it with Sense 3.6, then yes, they were the first ones to do it
There hasn´t been fully functional builds for the DHD, the Camera was not working properly due to issues with the drivers. This is the first that actually delivers 720p recording plus audio.
The reason XDA Devs wanted HTC to release the source code was to get their hands on the ICS Camera drivers (those had the most issues) and official GPU Drivers and other stuff, that yes its working right now, but could be way better with official drivers.
Ok, maybe I’m missing something…but how is this news?
There’s been fully working versions of ICS on the DHD/Inspire for months (I’ve run a few of them). While I’m not interested in Sense and it *might* be new, I really thought I saw some roms running that as well. I don’t see how anything here is brand new.
The reason we wanted HTC to release an official ICS update was to get the kernel source which would almost certainly carry optimizations and support for features on ICS. Of course, we also want to see the update because it means one of the pretty popular phones from that time period will move beyond Gingerbread for average users, meaning that it’s one less phone that doesn’t have access to the newer APIs and developers can be more confident in releasing apps that make use of ICS features (or don’t even support older versions).