Android flip side

    Buying a smartphone on the Android OS, we want to get a device that will be at the top of technological progress, in which there will be the most modern OS, the most advanced software, and all this we get when buying, but there is one thing ...

    Take for example the Samsung I5700 Spica, the smartphone is very worthy and in addition, very inexpensive, now it can be bought for 10,000 rubles and by and large it is no worse than the more hyped HTC Hero or HTC Wildfire. And it would seem that the I5700 is a great purchase, but if you dig deeper ... Samsung has officially announced that new firmware for the I5700 will no longer be released. To this we need to nail that Google is not going to slow down the pace of development of Android and Android 3, 4 just around the corner. What is the result?

    Already today we can’t install the latest version of Android 2.2 on the I5700, and after half a year the software developers will stop making software that supports older versions of the operating system.
    What do we have in the end? Telephone sales of which in Europe began last November, a year after the start of sales will become an obsolete device with an old operating system and old software. That's all you want to be on top of technological progress? Go to the store for a new one.
    But the I5700 is still on sale, that is, buying it now, you are buying an outdated device in advance. All of the above is true for HTC Hero and all other Android smartphones that came out more than a few months ago.

    There can only be one way out of this situation; smartphone developers should also be able to sell with their smartphone the ability to receive updates over several years. Here you can draw an analogy with Windows, bought Windows, received five years of free updates from Microsoft, and no one forces you to throw away your computer and buy a new version of Windows because new versions of programs do not work on Windows.

    But here there is one nuance Microsoft is an OS manufacturer, and Samsung is a manufacturer of smartphones and, by and large, Samsung or HTC is not at all as interested in releasing OS updates as the OS manufacturer itself. Everything would have been much simpler if the installation and updating scheme of Android were similar to Windows, firstly, a complete reinstallation of the system would not be required to install updates, and secondly, bare Android could be installed on any smartphone, and then installed on top of the driver and software from the smartphone manufacturer. But this is more likely from the realm of fiction.

    The moral of the article is very simple, I’m much more likely to buy an Android smartphone from the manufacturer that will promise me several years of updates than buy a smartphone that will become completely out of date in a year. At the moment, I see only one smartphone whose support is unlikely to stop in the coming months or a year, this is Nexus One .

    Why did I write this? I know that Samsung, HTC and other manufacturers of high-quality devices are listening to the opinions of their customers and I hope some of my thoughts will reach them and we will see a statement by manufacturers that updates to new smartphones will not be released for half a year, but for example three years.

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