Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment 770
MBCook writes "After seeing the announcement that Nexus One users won't get ICS, Michael Degusta made a chart to show how current the OS version on Android phones was over time... and the results are not encouraging."
Re:Buy Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
How about warranty support? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care about having the latest/greatest Android OS, but I wish the carriers were required to provide warranty support for the full 2 year term of your contract.
My droid 1 stopped working 19 months into my contract. I had bought the WPP wireless protection plan and figured it would have me covered, but when I called Verizon, they said that it only covered accidental damage and that I wouldn't be covered. They did offer to sell me a refurb phone for $150 or something like that, and offered me an early upgrade with a new 2 year contract term. I thought about "accidentally" dropping the phone into the sink and then making a damage claim with WPP, but I found a used one on eBay for a bit less than the WPP deductable.
If the carriers are going to lock me into a 2 year contract that I can't cancel, why aren't they required to make sure that the equipment they sold me works throughout the entire contract?
At the very least, carriers should be required to let me drop the voice/data contract and pay only the phone subsidy ($15 - $20/mo?) if I want to end the contract.
Re:Buy Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a fair point about the walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, but I'm willing to bet that at least 90% of all Android phone users will never install an App from outside the Android marketplace and will never, ever consider installing CyanogenMod or even know what it is.
Re:what's the obsession with the latest version (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPhone 3G did get software updates, up to the latest version of 4, but it really is just not capable of running iOS5 (it was barely capable of running iOS4)
Re:Like PC's (Score:4, Interesting)
This is sad, but this is true.
If you watch Triumph of the Nerds [wikipedia.org], you'll have an idea, why PCs are so open: because IBM tried to rush the product out of the door and open interface and interchangeable parts from different manufactures was their only option. IIRC, Larry Ellison calls this decision to basically open everything "the huge business mistake" in this very movie too.
Re:What a stupid us of statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
Nexus One currently has tons of bugs:
- Clock drift (as much as 5 minutes/week!)
- WiFI/network switchover. When I leave home, I have to enter airplane mode and turn it back off, or else my 2G/3G data will not work simply because the phone liked my home WiFI so much.
- Headphone jack sometimes goes nuts. If you get an incoming call while listening to music, there's no way of predicting if sound will go to headphones or the speaker. Once this resulted in all calls going to headphones, even when they were disconnected. I couldn't hear anything and lost an important call.
- Buggy car dock bluetooth, also no way of predicting if it will use the dock's or the phone's speaker.
- Ringtones sometimes change randomly. It may be *any* song or the "default" ringtone.
- The launcher becomes slow and unresponsive over time, crashes and after that works OK until the next slowdown and crash.
- Sometimes the screen locker stops responding. This looks like a touchscreen bug, however holding the power button reveals a menu which does work correctly. So this is not a frozen phone or hardware problem.
- The Gingerbread update was awful until 2.3.5 was released. Reboots and slowdowns every two days. 2.3.5 fixed reboots, but the pre-gingerbread bugs are still there.
This is just a few bugs!