> Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.
Amen. One begins to realize that the serious upside of a monolithic product (e.g. the iPhone) is that your reputation is tied to a single product. With Android, there is no single company to blame for poor software support or constrained upgrade path (Google? HTC? AT&T?)
My sense is that Google is giving OEMs far too many options. The message should be, "Hey OEM, here's the Android project. Do a git clone and install it on your phone. Then you can call it Android. If that's not good enough for you, do a fork and call it whatever you want, but don't you dare call it Android."
I think that the tacit assumption when you buy a "Google Phone" is that it will have an upgrade path similar to the iPhone, and so free of the dysfunctional interplay between Google and the OEM (and, thanks to Google's weight, maybe even the carrier). But this has proven not to be the case. (Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4).
> Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4
No, they really don't. Google has been clear that, in their opinion, the Nexus One hardware doesn't support ICS. And while we all know someone will shoehorn a version of ICS on there somehow (after all, someone did it for the G1), there's plenty of evidence that Google's opinion is reasonable:
- the limited internal storage (512 MB) [ICS distributions are substantially bigger than Gingerbread ones and there were plenty of Nexus One users pinched for space on Gingerbread]
- the relatively weak GPU [less ability to support and probably less benefit from the new rendering architecture]
- no front-facing camera [i.e. no Face Unlock]
- no NFC [i.e. no Android Beam]
- ...
Feel free to complain that Google and HTC made bad choices when designing the Nexus One, if you want. In retrospect, they clearly did. But it isn't at all hard to explain why the Nexus One isn't getting ICS.
Actually, they do. You've done a lot of explaining for them, but the fact that you did so implies that the need. What you say may be true (and it certainly sounds reasonable) but I personally haven't seen this kind of messaging from Google, and I bought my N1 directly from them.
Indeed, I'm rather curious to know what the primary source is for your information. Perhaps there is an Android or a Nexus One blog I should be subscribed to.
That's the thing. Not that I don't read plenty of Android blogs (Phandroid and Android Police are my current favorites), but there's no magic here: My primary sources were the Nexus One specifications and the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights. Beyond confirming expectations on storage space, the only detail I really added was knowing that the Nexus One GPU is relatively weak.
More generally, I wouldn't expect any company to do a point-by-point deconstruction of a product (past or present) the way I did. It is unreasonable to expect a company to trash something that plenty of employees worked on and plenty of customers were happy with. But I expect these sorts of issues were the subtext of Google/HTC saying that the Nexus One was "too old" for ICS.
The N1 is over two years old and what two maybe three hardware generations behind. I don't think its unreasonable that it isn't supported by the latest OS or that Google has stopped communicating about it. I love my Nexus One (its birthday is the 5th) and I've really stopped paying close attention to the latest and greatest Android device. Few people care or know that they are running 2.3.6 vs. 2.2.4. Yeah it's disappointing to not be the most favored phone after walking in the light for so long but it was bound to happen sooner or later which for tech, especially phones is sooner.
When I EOL my N1 I'll again start paying attention religiously to phandroid, androidandme, and bgr to find Google's next golden child.
Comments
> Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.
Amen. One begins to realize that the serious upside of a monolithic product (e.g. the iPhone) is that your reputation is tied to a single product. With Android, there is no single company to blame for poor software support or constrained upgrade path (Google? HTC? AT&T?)
My sense is that Google is giving OEMs far too many options. The message should be, "Hey OEM, here's the Android project. Do a git clone and install it on your phone. Then you can call it Android. If that's not good enough for you, do a fork and call it whatever you want, but don't you dare call it Android."
I think that the tacit assumption when you buy a "Google Phone" is that it will have an upgrade path similar to the iPhone, and so free of the dysfunctional interplay between Google and the OEM (and, thanks to Google's weight, maybe even the carrier). But this has proven not to be the case. (Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4).
> Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4
No, they really don't. Google has been clear that, in their opinion, the Nexus One hardware doesn't support ICS. And while we all know someone will shoehorn a version of ICS on there somehow (after all, someone did it for the G1), there's plenty of evidence that Google's opinion is reasonable:
- the limited internal storage (512 MB) [ICS distributions are substantially bigger than Gingerbread ones and there were plenty of Nexus One users pinched for space on Gingerbread]
- the relatively weak GPU [less ability to support and probably less benefit from the new rendering architecture]
- no front-facing camera [i.e. no Face Unlock]
- no NFC [i.e. no Android Beam]
- ...
Feel free to complain that Google and HTC made bad choices when designing the Nexus One, if you want. In retrospect, they clearly did. But it isn't at all hard to explain why the Nexus One isn't getting ICS.
>No, they really don't.
Actually, they do. You've done a lot of explaining for them, but the fact that you did so implies that the need. What you say may be true (and it certainly sounds reasonable) but I personally haven't seen this kind of messaging from Google, and I bought my N1 directly from them.
Indeed, I'm rather curious to know what the primary source is for your information. Perhaps there is an Android or a Nexus One blog I should be subscribed to.
That's the thing. Not that I don't read plenty of Android blogs (Phandroid and Android Police are my current favorites), but there's no magic here: My primary sources were the Nexus One specifications and the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights. Beyond confirming expectations on storage space, the only detail I really added was knowing that the Nexus One GPU is relatively weak.
More generally, I wouldn't expect any company to do a point-by-point deconstruction of a product (past or present) the way I did. It is unreasonable to expect a company to trash something that plenty of employees worked on and plenty of customers were happy with. But I expect these sorts of issues were the subtext of Google/HTC saying that the Nexus One was "too old" for ICS.
The N1 is over two years old and what two maybe three hardware generations behind. I don't think its unreasonable that it isn't supported by the latest OS or that Google has stopped communicating about it. I love my Nexus One (its birthday is the 5th) and I've really stopped paying close attention to the latest and greatest Android device. Few people care or know that they are running 2.3.6 vs. 2.2.4. Yeah it's disappointing to not be the most favored phone after walking in the light for so long but it was bound to happen sooner or later which for tech, especially phones is sooner.
When I EOL my N1 I'll again start paying attention religiously to phandroid, androidandme, and bgr to find Google's next golden child.