New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android

Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android by ubernostrum on Monday March 15, 2010 @03:46PM (#1193888)

"As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem."

INT. WHITE ROOM

We see two men -- (pudgy but adorable comedian, wearing a robot costume) and (douchey hipsterish guy) -- standing side by side.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hi, I'm an iPhone.

ADORABLE COMEDIAN

And I'm an Android.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hey, Android, have you played this great new game?

You can fill in the rest of the script from here, and perhaps in so doing you'll realize how quickly this could become a major marketing problem for Android...

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Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android by orangecat on Monday March 15, 2010 @04:23PM (#1193996)

That already exists with the iPhone today, where the 3GS often runs CPU-intensive apps much better than the earlier models. Segmentation is unavoidable as long as hardware is improving.

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Re:New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android by mlinsey on Monday March 15, 2010 @09:02PM (#1194619)

"3GS or better required" is much more understandable than "1Ghz Snapdragon or better required", since the package the customer buys says "3GS" prominently - it's even in the name of the device. In fact, customers already are faced with the decision of "3G" vs "3GS" when they buy an iPhone.

What this suggests is that the solution for Android will be to have some easily-understandable number or naming scheme to roughly classify the power of the phone, so apps don't have to list compatible phones en masse. For desktop software, most people basically used the required and recommended CPU speed as such a number. Even though it didn't really capture the full nuances of whether an app required more RAM or more CPU, it was a good enough rough metric.

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