Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by jsz0 on Monday March 15, 2010 @05:09PM
(#1194133)
Probably the biggest difference is the software library for Android was fairly small 1.x to 1.5 to 1.6 and backwards compatibility wasn't really a problem. Today there are quite a few 2.0+ only apps out there including many of Google's own first party applications. There's a larger group of apps that kinda work on 1.x but don't seem to be extensively tested on 1.x so crashing/bugs start to become a problem. So if you go buy a new Android phone running 1.5 or 1.6 you will almost certainly run into problems with third party applications.
Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by dagw on Monday March 15, 2010 @03:05PM
(#1193784)
It's not only old phones. For example the yet to be release Sony-Ericsson X10 series of phones will ship with 1.6 with no word on whether it will ever be upgradeable to 2.x.
Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by kgrin on Monday March 15, 2010 @02:32PM
(#1193685)
Well, there IS some of "this hardware can't support X feature". But another reason some phones haven't been upgraded is that they're running custom Android builds, courtesy of the manufacturer or carrier - so those take longer to get updated.
Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by vetinari on Monday March 15, 2010 @03:11PM
(#1193799)
Actually, HTC G1 runs Android 2.1 just fine. A little bit on the sluggish side, but fine.
Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by albemuth on Monday March 15, 2010 @04:57PM
(#1194104)
the G1 runs 1.6 kind of sluggish already, how much worse is it?
Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
by vetinari on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @05:17AM
(#1195325)
Somewhat. I know, it is not useful answer. Some things are faster (the browser, for example), but some are way slower (when launching apps, there is an uncomfortable delay, the phone app is also very slow, it can take up to one second to change state on the screen to correspond to the call state).
It should automatically update (barring the unforeseen) to the most current level of Android OS it can support, as it has done for all the existing Android users as new releases became available.
The only thing I can foresee as a problem is that older hardware may not be able to support the newest Android versions. The HTC G1 doesn't appear to support Android 2.0, which makes sense, as it's MUCH older than the Droid or Nexus One. That causes problems more for the developers than for the end users I suspect, but I think that people are used to the logic with PCs -- I can't play the new game, need to upgrade.