Samsung Galaxy S2 - Ice Cream Sandwich

Yesterday, my UK Simfree Samsung Glaxy S2 phone (on vodafone) started flashing a message saying "Software update available". Knowing that it was likely to be the Android Ice Cream Sandwich update,   I waited patiently all day until i could get home onto my home Wifi network before allowing it to upgrade. However when i got home and connected to the mothership,  it then said "no upgrades available"... hmmm

After a quick search i found i had to plug the phone into my laptop and let Samsung Kies do the upgrade...But first I found i needed to upgrade my version of Samsung Kies.
80mb download later (only 29Mb for Apple!??) and what seemed like ages for the installation to complete, and i was ready...
First hing i did was back up my phone. This took about 10mins as i seem to have quite a few photos and music files on there. Next the upgrade started.  A fairly painless process that completed whilst i was eating my dinner.

After dinner i was then ready to use my newly upgraded SGS2. First impressions were that the Pattern Unlock looks very strange, and the clock on the lock screen looked odd. Not the nice big round buttons i was used to - just little circles. not a big problem  i can live with that, and am now getting to like the new look.

Once the phone was unlocked i noticed all my shortcuts had been wiped and replaced with a bunch of default widgets and shortcuts which i promptly deleted. Where had all my carefully placed shortcuts gone??

After a few minutes messing about looking for new features, and discovering the cool new developer options and other new stuff, i started to realise the phone was not as responsive to touch as it had been prior the the upgrade. in fact touch sensitivity was appalling! I activated the developer option that "shows  touches" and when navigating around the phone, i could clearly see that i was lightly touching the screen as a circle would appear, yet the phone seemed to ignore my actions unless i touched for an extended amount of time. Very frustrating.

So what used to take just a light tap of the screen, now takes a more deliberate press-and-hold type action.
In reality this probably only adds about 10ms to the act of tapping, but  none the less, its noticeable, and its very frustrating...
Overall, not a total disaster, but also not really the enjoyable experience I was expecting from the much hyped, much anticipated Android ICS upgrade for Galaxy S2!

My advice to other SGS2 users?  don't bother with the upgrade - stick to what you have now until its been patched to cure the touchscreen sensitivity problems