This is probably the last thing I’d have ever expected to see in the news wire today. The HTC Thunderbolt is coming up on its two-year anniversary, and we figured the device had simply been abandoned by Verizon. It was the first 4G LTE phone, sure, but its launch was plagued by poor battery life and some nasty bugs, and the lack of Ice Cream Sandwich — after nearly a year of availability — didn’t help.

Welp, it looks like although the phone seemed to exist at the very bottom of the 4G LTE totem pole, Verizon finally got around to delivering Ice Cream Sandwich for it. Most people wouldn’t be satisfied until they got Jelly Bean, but if you happen to still be rocking your HTC Thunderbolt after all this time then you’d better jump for joy and take a day off of work for Ice Cream Sandwich.

Some of the changes the Ice Cream Sandwich update will provide include the ability to access the notification bar via the lock-screen, the ability to swipe individual notifications away to get rid of them, the ability to customize the home-screen’s launch bar, a face unlock mechanism, the new ICS-style apps switcher and more.

Users will be on the lookout for firmware 7.02.605.06 710RD, Android version 4.0.4 and HTC Sense 3.6, and the update will be close to 400MB — you can put that old 4G LTE workhorse to work if you still have unlimited data, but getting on WiFi would be the far wiser choice. Unfortunately we’re not sure when, exactly, the upgrade will beam itself to handsets everywhere, but we’ll be on the lookout for its arrival in the days and weeks to come.

[via Verizon 1 | 2]