Obtaining some 4.0 functions on a 2.3 phone through rooting? I'm thinking of maybe rooting my phone, for various reasons. But one of the main ones is that I find the current version of Calendar, amongst others, that I have, very lacking. And I'm almost sure the version that comes with Ice Cream Sandwich or later is better. It just has to, seeing all the "what the heck?" things there are in the one I have.

(There's also the fact I need to free my super small phone memory as much as possible, which I'm not allowed to, but this is not what I want to ask about.)

To be clear, I know for sure that my device cannot run full later versions of Android. Clearly, unless you can use an SD card as an extension block of RAM and processor AND install the OS on it, I doubt I can do this. My phone is way too basic.

However, I would like to know if there's a way, through rooting my phone, to get some features of Android 4.0 and up. Such as a better calendar with more features, or the ability to put contacts in groups, for example.

I did look at some third-party calendar software reviews, but none of them seemed to beat the original up-to-date one. Every review seemed to point out things like "calendar app XYZ is great, but X function isn't very compatible with Google Calendar", or "XYZ Google Calendar function doesn't work on it yet", for example.

My phone's specs should be:


Samsung Galaxy Q (SGH-T589W)
Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread
Processor: 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 (if indeed it's the same as the Gravity Smart, because information on the Galaxy Q is rare)
Internal storage: 152 MB, some of which I think is taken up by the OS or useless stock software, because I can't ever seem to free it
RAM: 279 MB
SD card: 2 GB
Short answer: No!

That would cause the handset to boot-loop or cause F/C (Force Close) as Ice Cream Sandwich and later, their apps are relying on the v4.x framework.

By bringing it across to Gingerbread could spell disaster and "weird" issues with the handset. 

However, bringing across Gingerbread 2.3.x apps across to Ice Cream Sandwich should work, (Paradox ahead...) as ICS upwards would have compatibility layer within their framework for running apps that target below ICS! Hope this part makes sense!