Google’s Hugo Barra has announced that the first Nexus device, the Nexus One, aka the HTC Passion, will not get an update to ICS. Officially that is.

The limitation is the hardware, which Hugo Barra says is too old to run Ice Cream Sandwich. This would likely be due to an old CPU and GPU.

However, I am fairly sceptical about this. The Nexus One doesn’t have a dual-core processor, but neither does the Nexus S which will be updated to ICS. Both devices are clocked at 1GHz and have an ARMv7 instruction set. RAM, also isn’t the problem: the Nexus One and S both have 512MB of memory. The only limitation I imagine is the onboard storage: the Nexus One only has 512MB, whereas the Nexus S has 16GB. Still, if you ask me Google are being lazy.

I’m sure people will do their best to hack ICS on to the device, hopefully with ICS coming to the device via CyanogenMod 9 and other custom ROMs. If it is the lack of storage, could a stripped-down version not be put on the Nexus One?