Hello again, hazelbee
To give you a brief history, as I see it: I bought my G300 in June/July 2012, when it came with GB B892. I had been unaware that there was an upgrade to ICS pending, and wasn't too bothered about it, but when the upgrade was offered at the beginning of Nov 2012, I took it. I hadn't had a smartphone before, but was very used to Windows PCs, where rolling back was relatively simple if an upgrade didn't work out too well.
There was a small patch to B895, which included a back-up facility not included in B892, then a big upgrade to B936 - which gave moderate problems for lots of people, and really serious problems for quite a few. In my case, battery life fell to a few hours, apps crashed all the time, the spell-checker seemed to challenge virtually everything, lots more besides - really distressing. I found the forum at the time, was sort-of reassured that others were in the same boat, but puzzled that Vodafone, despite pre-release testing, was clearly as taken aback as the rest of us.
Thanks to the forum, I discovered that Huawei had released a Vodafone-approved downgrade back to B895, and after about a week of misery I decided that I had better take it. There was then about a month before a patch from B936 to B952 was released, but I decided not to rush in this time. Although B952 was clearly a great deal better than B936, a lot of people still reported trouble, and I decided in the end that I'd stay safely on B895, where I still am! There was an ICS version B960, and some late G300s were sold with that, a few others acquired it when sent in for repair, but there was never an upgrade made available, and I note that Dave reckons B952 is the end of the trail.
It was version B936_F which I installed, although it had a slightly different release date from the one which has shown up recently. It might be OK as a stepping stone to B952 (I don't believe there is an official Vodafone-approved upgrade direct to B952), but you don't want B936 of any variety as an end point, so I'd advise strongly not to use it unless you get confirmation that the onward patch to B952 is available.
I haven't checked the Huawei website to see if the downgrade is still available, but I do still have it on my PC, so could get it to you in an emergency! However, it doesn't work as a downgrade from B952, so it wouldn't help you out if you got to B952 and didn't like it.
My impression from the phone-specific parts of the forum is that phones do best with their original firmware, and that subsequent upgrades tend to lead to trouble. This applies to some extent even to the really top-end phones, and with greater force at the budget end of the range. The G300 is a super little phone, but it doesn't have either the memory or the power of some of the latest phones, and my suspicion is that ICS is a step too far. It's possible that there may be a QA dimension to it as well, and the info a few posts back about different grades of memory chip is interesting.
Oh dear, this was supposed to be a brief resume, but it goes on a bit. Anyhow, I hope it's helpful.
Annie.
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