Your chances of getting ICS on your legacy device are virtually zero. whereas getting IOS 6 on the iphone 4S is assured.

There are two kinds of Android users in this world - those who care about this issue, and those who don't. The former tend to be the innovators and early adopters who pay attention to every new OS release and whatnot, the latter are the mainstream users who just want a working phone and don't follow the tech rags and don't really care about the details.

So what I wonder is, if you're in the former group, why buy any Android phone other than a Nexus variant straight from Google, which is the only one guaranteed to get the latest greatest OS updates as painlessly as possible? I'm in that group, and I couldn't imagine buying some mangled, bloated carrier-modified version of Android. Is it just the marginally better hardware specs that attract people?

I... Hate... This... Phone...

And here I could deliver a scathing rant about the camera locking up the phone and refusing to properly focus. Or I could go on about the constant gmail, navigator, and browser crashes, the horrid battery life (even in 3G with the "extended" battery) and yeesh I'll just stop here...

And don't get me started about my Galaxy Tab 10.1 still stuck on 3.2 6 months after the release of ICS.

So why did I buy the Nexus? Because I figured the much-vaunted 2011 google phone would get great support. But if this is the best they can manage, sign me up for a Windows phone. More realistically, I'm going IOS on the next spin. Android is dead to me.

I... Love... This... Phone...

It takes beautiful pictures at an amazing speed, I get absolutely 0 crashes using multiple different applications, battery ALWAYS lasts at least the whole day no matter how hard I use it, and I love every single features ICS has to offer. I am in no way jealous of anything my iPhone friends can do with their phone and I will gladly buy another Nexus device when I'll decide to change phone.

I just wanted to offer the different experience I've had...

Edit:

Key steps in writing that comparison table:

1. Whatever iOS 6 has and ICS does not, list it to be on ICS via third party.

2. Don't do third party additions on the iOS 6 column as if there are no third party apps on that platform.

Might as well say, "Android is open-source and since the phones are Turing machines Android does everything ever possible by a computer through third-party support. Maybe it's a painful experience but it does do it." More than that, I'm tired of looking at such comparisons that boil down features to bullet points. Imagine BlackBerry running the following ad after the announcement of the iPhone in 2007:

   BlackBerry already offers more that what is coming in the iPhone.
   Open websites, send messages, make phone calls, read your email.

If he's running a custom ROM he should find a better one or return to stock. If that's not the case, a warranty replacement is in order because something is definitely faulty with his hardware.

Sounds like there might be a hardware issue with the previous person's device perhaps?

1. Have a phone/tablet you don't like and complain about it

2. Get a different phone/tablet that you do like.

3. Install a custom ROM.

I have a Galaxy Nexus and the Tab 10.1. Installing AOKP made a huge difference, regarding the things you mentioned and many more. My Tab 10.1 is a great tablet now because of it, and I hated TouchWiz while I had it.

Latest milestone: http://aokp.co/index.php/releases/_/milestone-5-r20 RootzWiki thread about it: http://rootzwiki.com/topic/19302-aokp-toro-june-4-build-38-4...

Perhaps I am lazy, perhaps I am somewhere in between those two archetypes you mention. I want to hold the device i buy before i buy it, as such i need to go to my provider store and see it, dare i say, touch it. This fact alone eliminates the option of seeing the nexus variant.

You don't have to follow the Techrags or details to want the latest and greatest.

As a service provider, we see the device stats in our logs across tens of millions of users, and the numbers line up with Apple's slide: over 80% of iOS devices are updated to iOS 5, and under 7% of Android devices are on Android 4.

And really, it's a lot worse than that, with variations in the 2.x releases, even within the 2.3.x releases, affecting whether devices are able to stream video properly or not.

What is considered tinkering is not necessarily being a power user.

To me that's an example of a power user - something that IOS does not allow.

To take it further - I imagine that one can't be a power user of an IOS no more than you can be a power user of a toaster - there is one way to insert and remove the bread, equally available to all.

If you're an IOS user, you're paying the comparable price of the latest nexus phone. If you buy the nexus instead of an iPhone, you WILL get the latest upgrade and range of new features by default. Let's keep a similar comparison please.

Because the Nexus has been getting pretty mediocre reviews and none of the Nexus variants really interest me from a hardware point of view.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2568348/galaxy-nexus-revi...

http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/10/sprint-galaxy-nexus-revie...

http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Samsung-Galaxy-Nexus-Revie...

Bitrot, bitrot, bitrot.

Do you know how much of it will be enabled? (e.g. will it have Siri working out of the box?)

(Genuine question, btw.)

As far as I'm aware this is a deliberate disabling thing as the original Siri app worked on earlier models (maybe not the 3GS but the 4).

My point is the average user isn't sitting there with their Galaxy-Titan-whatever in their hands feverishly checking what version of Android they're running and yelling "Where is my ICS!!" They're posting to Facebook, emailing, tweeting, searching for restaurants..etc

It's all about features.. and the fact is that iOS6 is catching up with Android 2.2... not 4.0

If you're in America, I have even less pity. The $200 price difference between some low-end free-on-contract smartphone and the $200 Galaxy Nexus or HTC One X is near negligible when you consider the price of the voice+data+messaging plan over the course of a 2 year contract.

edit: oh wait i think i misinterpreted you original comment. my condolences for coming off as an ass.

Keep in mind the problem of vendor recalcitrance is much less of an issue for an interested Android user. You can literally reflash your phone to a mod with an app from your phone. You don't even necessarily need to plug it in to anything.

That's a pretty packed up qualification there. Users that interested are not, have not been, and will not be par for the course on the Android platform.

Moreover, the in-app phone flashing is not something every Android phone can do. I speak from experience owning an Android phone that wouldn't play ball in this regard.

If this is the metric, then do you think the average iPhone user cares about what version of iOS they have? So many iPhone users are shocked when you walk up and double tap on the home button.

For the people who care on Android, there is a way to upgrade. For the people who don't care, there change is meaningless.

While this is a dog's dinner compared to the great adoption rates on new phones and new versions of iOS, it's worth mentioning.

Yes, but how important is this really in practice? With both platforms approaching maturity deploying major OS updates OTA is going to be less important.

Google can ride the natural device upgrade cycle to get out new versions. If they can make the browser and email client and a few other key apps independent of the OS they can rev those a lot faster. No doubt they'd like to have Apple's upgrade muscle but I'm not convinced they really need it in the long term.

It's pretty important to user satisfaction that Joe can say to Sally "You have an iPhone, right? Check out what they can do now!" And Sally be able to say "Mine does that too? Awesome!"

As opposed to Android, where Joe and Sally can barely help one another through the various UI skins half the time, let alone share enjoyment in cool new software features on devices purchased mere months apart.

(Sure, with iOS there are updates and features that don't get patched into older devices. But those situations are vanishingly few compared to Android.)

So, as an answer to the various times this question has been posed in this thread: Yes. It's a big deal to normal users that reasonably contemporary devices behave the same and generally have the same software features. And it's a very big deal for them to find out they bought the 'wrong' phone, not six months ago, because they got a model that will likely never get the cool new software feature their friend just showed them.

The degree to which updates don't matter, is the degree to which the users are barely interested in the device at all and use them as little more than a flip phone with better email and browser.

Which, while accurate for a certain population of users, hardly supports the relevance of any possible Android feature advantage.

Sally won't be able to do Turn by turn if she has a 3GS or iPhone 4, whereas even out of date Android's on 1.6 can.

The situation is much more nuanced than you state.

I would argue that as new features in newer versions of operating systems become more and more of a spectacle that people everywhere, not just geeks are watching, Pushing major OS updates becomes more and more important.

If you're going to show off a new feature to the world, it's nice if most people can actually get at it.

No, but only the really low-end Android phones are coming out with 2.x anymore and that number is going to dwindle quickly over the next year. And ICS is not as crucial as some people make it out to be since 2.x is a decent platform already and a lot of features have been backported.

I can't agree with that. Many felt that way in 2006 and definitely turned out not to be the case.

Like I said, no fundamental changes.

Agree that notifications pull down and similar are gravy, but tasty gravy nonetheless.

Even depending upon CyanogenMod has failed me. T-Mobile loves getting non-standard devices and then not releasing drivers that could help boost their own popularity - likely for IP reasons. I have owned dev phones in the past, and this was my first consumer device, and coincidentally the first Android device that I could not easily unlock and update on my own.

No, you can't compare a first gen Android device, but you sure as hell can compare a device more powerful than some netbooks.

Chances are iOS6 will have a higher percentage of iOS users than ICS of Android users after the first day or so.

A quick look round a random sample from one of the big high street dealers here in the UK shows that a fair number are still shipping with 2.3.

As a loyal TMo G2 (stock Froyo) owner, I wholeheartedly agree with that opinion. As other replies called out, TMo has a knack for luring you in and never releasing OS updates.

That said, I'm very happy running my "legacy" Froyo OS: My GPS is fast and spot-on, data pipe is 4G-wide, and my bit-laggy camera app is supplemented by dedicated hardware for anything cleaner than "LOL quality."

I've stuck with the Google reference models since the G1, and while I'm usually behind on "what's new" (I'm currently on a Nexus S, while the Nexus Galaxy has been out for awhile now), my wife is constantly buying the 'new' Android hotness, and is perennially jealous of my phone, even when it's older and has less features.

I get the software updates faster, everything works, and nothing has been mucked with, ala Blur or whatever. Meanwhile her phone is dual core, has HDMI out, and is better on paper, but crashes often, becomes unresponsive and lags on Android updates.

edit: the -> your (I know the point of updating the 3GS, I don't understand the OPs point in its attempt to mock Android)

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096633

I don't see the OPs point as 3GSs getting the update aren't better off than Android devices on 2.3 which still have access to many backported Android APIs.

Some features are missing from the compatibility library, but have been made up by open source projects such as ActionBar Sherlock (which is great by the way if anyone hasn't tried it out yet).

Yes, Apple does port an iOS version to most devices, and yes manufacturers have been very slow with ICS, but Apple doesn't push all the features when they port the OS to older hardware either, and sometime they are major features.