The man in charge of products for mobile at Google, Hugo Barra, has confirmed that the Nexus One won't be getting the new Ice Cream Sandwich update, because the phone is simply too old.

Ice Cream Sandwich brings together Android Honeycomb and Gingerbread and requires some hefty hardware to run smoothly; given that the Nexus One is nearly two years old, Google has concluded that the phone is simply too old to run the new OS.

The phone - the first piece of hardware sold by Google directly to consumers - was made by HTC and was released back in January 2010 with the support forum closed in November. It proved to be a tough sale given that HTC started to sell the HTC Desire only a few weeks later with a wider retail base and at a cheaper price.

The fact that the Nexus One will not run ICS almost certainly means that the HTC Desire (and the other derivatives, Desire HD, Desire Z) will not be upgradable to Google's latest OS as well, especially given how lengthy and complicated the development of Gingerbread was for the Desire.

It also casts a shadow on any Ice Cream Sandwich update for smartphones that use the same Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC (QSD8250) and come with the same amount of onboard memory like the HTC Desire S or the Incredible S. Both the Wildfire and the Wildfire S are also unlikely to get ICS.