Another day, another set of Android fragmentation stories. And while
there’s no doubt that there is wide fragmentation within the platform,
and there’s not real solution in sight, I’m starting to wonder if Google
ever had a plan to prevent the platform for becoming a fragmented mess.
OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. Ice Cream
Sandwich is by all accounts very nice; but what good does that do app
developers, when according to Google’s own stats, 30% of all Android
devices are still running an OS that is 20 months old?
…
More than two-thirds of iOS users had upgraded to iOS 5 a mere three
months after its release. Anyone out there think that Ice Cream Sandwich
will crack the 20% mark on Google’s platform pie chart by March?
He then goes on to deliver the killer blow:
OS fragmentation is the single greatest problem Android
faces, and it’s only going to get worse. Android’s massive success over
the last year mean that there are now tens if not hundreds of millions
of users whose handset manufacturers and carriers may or may not allow
them to upgrade their OS someday; and the larger that number grows, the
more loath app developers will become to turn their back on them. That
unwillingness to use new features means Android apps will fall further
and further behind their iOS equivalents, unless Google manages – via
carrot, stick, or both – to coerce Android carriers and manufacturers to
prioritize OS upgrades.
OK, so Android is fragmented, and it’s a problem that Google doesn’t
seem willing to tackle. But the more I look at the Android platform and
the associated ecosystem, it makes me wonder if Google ever had any plan
(or for that matter intention) to control platform fragmentation.
I disagree with Kindel that that there’s nothing that Google can do
to at least try to discourage fragmentation. I believe that
one of Google’s strongest cards are Android users themselves. Look at
how enthusiastic iPhone and iPad owners are about iOS updates. They’re
enthusiastic because Apple tells them why they should be enthusiastic
about new updates. Compare this to Google’s approach to Android
customers. Google (or anyone else in the chain for that matter) doesn’t
seem to be doing much to get people fired up and enthusiastic about
Android. In fact, it seems to me the only message being given to Android
customers is ‘buy another Android handset.’
I understand that Google isn’t Apple and can’t seem to sway the
crowds in the same way, but it might start to help if the search giant
seemed to care about the OS. The absence of enthusiasm make the seem
Sphinx-like and uncaring. Why should anyone care about new Android
updates when Google itself doesn’t really seem all that excited? If
Google created a real demand for Android updates from the end users,
this would put put pressure on the handset makers and the carriers to
get updates in a timely fashion to users.
Make the users care about updates, and the people standing in the way of those updates will sit up and pay attention to things.
Personal comment:
Google with Android OS is now in a similar place than Microsoft with Windows, and blaming Google to have this disparity of OS versions would be the same than blaming Microsoft on the fact that Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are still co-existing nowadays. One reason Android got that 'fragged' is that it has to face a rapid evolution of hardware and new kind of devices in a very short time, somehow having a kind of Frankenstein-like experience with its Android creature. Many distinct hardware manufacturers adopt Android, develop their own GUI layer on top of it, making Google having a direct control on the spread of new Android version quite impossible... as each manufacturer may need to perform their own code update prior to propose a new version of Android on their own devices.
The direct comparison with iOS is a kind of unfair as Apple do have a rapid update cycle by controlling every single workings of the overall mechanism: SDK regular updates push developers to adopt new features and forget about old iOS versions and new iDevice's Apps request the end-user to upgrade their iOS version to the last one in order to be able to install new Apps. Meanwhile, Apple is having control on hardware design, production and evolution too, making the propagation of new iOS versions much easier and much faster than it is for Google with Android.
Then, mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) do have a short life timeline and this was already true prior Google and Apple starts acting in this market. So whatever your name is Google or Apple, considering not proposing the very last version of your OS on so-called 'old' or obsolete hardware is a kind of an obvious choice to do. This is not even a 'choice' but more a direct consequence of how fast technology is evolving nowadays.
Now, smartphones and tablets hardware capabilities will reach a 'standard' level to become 'mature' products (all smartphones/tablets do have cameras, video capabilities, editing capabilities etc...) which may make easier for Android to spread over on all devices in a similar version while hardware evolution observes a pause. Already Apple's last innovations are more linked to software than real hardware (r)evolution, so Android may take benefit of this in order to reduce the gap.
Microsoft has developed a new kind of Wi-Fi network that performs at
its top speed even in the face of interference. It takes advantage of a
new Wi-Fi standard that uses more of the electromagnetic spectrum, but
also hops between the narrow bands of unused spectrum within television
broadcast frequencies.
In 2008, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved limited use of "white spaces"—portions
of spectrum adjacent to existing television transmissions. The ruling,
in effect, expanded the available spectrum. Microsoft developed the new
network partly as a way to push Congress to allow much broader use of
white spaces, despite some concerns over interference with some other
types of wireless devices, such as wireless microphones.
The fastest Wi-Fi networks, which can transmit data at up to a
gigabit per second, use as much spectrum as possible, up to 160
megahertz, to maximize bandwidth. Krishna Chintalapudi and his team at
Microsoft Research have pioneered an approach, called WiFi-NC, which
makes efficient use of these white spaces at these speeds.
Rather than using a conventional Wi-Fi radio, it uses an array of
tiny, low-data rate transmitters and receivers. Each of these broadcast
and receive via a different, narrow range of spectrum. Bundled together,
they work just like a regular Wi-Fi radio, but can switch between
white-space frequencies far more efficiently.
That means the system is compatible with existing equipment. "The
entire reception and transmission logic could be reused from existing
Wi-Fi implementations," says Chintalapudi.
The team calls these transmitters and receivers "receiver-lets" and
"transmitter-lets." Together, they make up what's known as a "compound
radio."
The resulting wireless network doesn't increase data rates in
specific ranges of spectrum above what's currently achieved with
latest-generation technology. It does, however, make more efficient use
of the entire range of spectrum, and especially the white spaces freed
up by the FCC.
The new radio integrates with a previous Microsoft project that provides a wireless device with access to a database of available white-space
spectrum in any part of the United States. That system, called
SenseLess, tells a device where it can legally broadcast and receive.
WiFi-NC then chooses the bands of spectrum that have the least
interference, and broadcasts over them.
By sending its signal over many smaller radios that operate in
slivers of the available spectrum, WiFi-NC suffers less interference and
experiences faster speeds even when a user is at the intersection of
overlapping networks. This is important because the white spaces that
may be authorized for commercial use by the FCC are at the lower ends of
the electromagnetic spectrum, where signals can travel much further
than existing Wi-Fi transmissions.
Whether or not Microsoft's WiFi-NC technology gets commercialized depends on Congress, says Kevin Werbach,
a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business
School, and an expert on the FCC's effort to make more spectrum
available for wireless data transmission.
"The problem is that many of the Congressional proposals to give the
FCC [the authority to auction off currently unused bandwidth] also
restrict it from making available white spaces for devices around that
spectrum," says Werbach.
Microsoft hopes WiFi-NC will persuade Congress to approve wider use of white spaces.
"It is our opinion that WiFi-NC's approach of using multiple narrow
channels as opposed to the current model of using wider channels in an
all-or-nothing style is the more prudent approach for the future of
Wi-Fi and white spaces," says Chintalapudi. The team's ultimate goal, he
adds, is to propose WiFi-NC as a new wireless standard for the hardware
and software industries.
OLPC had already announced it was bringing along its XO-3 tablet to CES this coming week; now we know what the new education-focused slate will look like. Less slimline than the older concepts and nowhere near as space-age as the earlier dual-screen XO-2 renders,
the new silicone-clad XO-3 does at least have the bonus of actually
fitting inside the Marvell ARMADA PXA618 processor and half gig of RAM
we’re expecting.
Up front is an 8-inch screen – a 1024 x 768 Pixel Qi panel,
no less, for indoor and outdoor visibility – with a peel-off silicone
cover so as to protect it from scratches and bumps while in a schoolbag.
There’ll also be solar panels on the inside, one of a trio of
recharging options to keep the OLPC XO-3 running: as well as plugging it
into the mains, should you have the luxury of being near an AC supply,
there’ll be a hand-crank to manually top up the battery.
Sixty seconds of cranking is good for ten minutes of use, or so OLPC
tells us, and the OS is either Android or the specialist
education-focused Sugar platform. Ports – which are also covered up by
that clever cover – include full-sized USB, audio and a memory card
slot.
Best of all, though, is the price: OLPC expects the XO-3 to kick off
at $100, though that will be for regular LCD rather than Pixel Qi
versions. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to drop by Best Buy and pick
one up, as OLPC will be selling direct to educational organizations and
charities.
Through this signage at Promenade Temecula, the mall is notifying shoppers that their phones may be tracked as they move throughout the premises.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?
While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.
But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.
The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked.
"We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to."
Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.
The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores.
The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order.
"We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone's cell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said.
Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, this technology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe and Australia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, hardly any shoppers decide to opt out.
"It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risks to privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out."
Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP,Fortune 500) and Home Depot (HD,Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence to use their technology, Biggar said.
Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is not currently using it any stores, a company spokesman said.JCPenney declined to comment on its relationship with the vendor.
Some retail analysts say the new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have been tracking shoppers for years through people counters, security cameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around.
And some even say websites that trackonline shoppersare more invasive, recording not only a user's name and purchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've left a site.
"It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is being collected anyway," Biggar said.
Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase, physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind of research, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath with their own sales figures, stores will have better measurements to help them improve the shopping experience.
"We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what's going wrong."
But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications of this kind of technology.
"Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?"
Last year,hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make it harder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligence scrambles those numbers twice.
"I'm sure as more people get more cell phones, it's probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource," Mulpuru said. "But I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out."
Personal comment:
One step further. I guess we have to be thankful to be given the ability to opt out the system by 'just' switching off our cell-phone!!!
The future of augmented-reality technology is here - as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say.
The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays - like those seen inTerminator- could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails - perhaps even video. In the shorter term, the breakthrough also means people suffering from conditions like diabetes and glaucoma may find they have a novel way to monitor their conditions.
In February,New Scientistrevealedthe litany of research projects underway in the field of contact lens enhancement. While one companyhas fielded a contact lens technologyusing a surface-mounted strain gauge to assess glaucoma risk, none have built in a display, or the lenses needed for focused projection onto the retina - and then tested it in vivo. They have now.
"We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit," says a US and Finnish team led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington in Seattle.
"This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry, and micrometre-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes."
The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. To focus the light on the rabbit's retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens - in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.
They found their lens LED glowed brightly up to a metre away from the radio source in free space, but needed to be 2 centimetres away when the lens was placed in a rabbit's eye and the wireless reception was affected by body fluids. All the 40-minute-long tests on live rabbits were performed under general anaesthetic and showed that the display worked well - and fluroescence tests showed no damage or abrasions to the rabbit's eyes after the lenses were removed.
While making a higher resolution display is next on their agenda, there are uses for this small one, say the researchers: "A display with a single controllable pixel could be used in gaming, training, or giving warnings to the hearing impaired."
"This is clearly way off in the future. But we're aware of the research that is ongoing in this field and we're watching the technology's potential for biosensing and drug delivery applications in particular," says a spokesperson for the British Contact Lens Association in London.
Focus in future will be on HTML5 as mobile world shifts towards
non-proprietary open standards – and now questions will linger over use
of Flash on desktop
Adobe is killing off development of its
mobile Flash plugin, and laying off 750 staff as part of broader
restructuring. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP
Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe,
will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a
note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.
Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5
technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same
functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary
technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.
The existing plugins for the Android and BlackBerry platforms will be given bug fixes and security updates, the company said in a statement first revealed by ZDNet. But further development will end.
The
decision also raises a question mark over the future of Flash on
desktop PCs. Security vulnerabilities in Flash on the desktop have been
repeatedly exploited to infect PCs in the past 18 months, while Microsoft
has also said that the default browser in its forthcoming Windows 8
system, expected at the end of 2012, will not include the Flash plugin
by default. Apple, which in the third quarter captured 5% of the world
market, does not include Flash in its computers by default.
John Nack, a principal product manager at Adobe, commented on his personal blog
(which does not necessarily reflect Adobe views) that: "Adobe saying
that Flash on mobile isn't the best path forward [isn't the same as]
Adobe conceding that Flash on mobile (or elsewhere) is bad technology.
Its quality is irrelevant if it's not allowed to run, and if it's not
allowed to run, then Adobe will have to find different ways to meet
customers' needs."
Around 250m iOS (iPhone, iPod Touches and iPad)
devices have been sold since 2007. There are no clear figures for how
many are now in use. More recently Larry Page, chief executive of
Google, said that a total of 190m Android devices have been activated.
It is not clear how many of those include a Flash plugin in the browser.
"Our
future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling
Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe Air for all the major
app stores," Adobe said in the statement. "We will no longer adapt
Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device
configurations.
"Some of our source code licensees may opt to
continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will
continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with
critical bug fixes and security updates."
The decision comes as
Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe.
An Adobe spokesperson declined to give any figures for the extent of
layoffs in the UK. The company reiterated its expectation that it will
meet revenue targets for the fourth quarter.
The reversal by Adobe
– and its decision to focus on the open HTML5 platform for mobile –
brings to an end a long and tumultuous row between Apple and Adobe over
the usefulness of Flash on the mobile platform. The iPhone launched in
2007 without Flash capability, as did the iPad in 2010.
Steve
Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, and Apple's engineers insisted that
Flash was a "battery hog" and introduced security and stability flaws;
Adobe countered that it was broadly implemented in desktop PCs and used
widely on the web.
Jobs's antagonism was partly driven, his
biography reveals, by Adobe's reluctance after he rejoined Apple in 1996
to port its movie-editing programs to the Mac and to keep its Photoshop
suite comparable on the Mac platform with the Windows one.
But
Jobs also insisted that mobile Flash failed in the role of providing a
good user experience, and also would restrict Apple's ability to push
forward on the iOS platform. Studies of browser crash reports by Apple's
teams showed that Flash was responsible for a signficant proportion of
user problems; Apple was also not satisfied that a Flash plugin would be
available for the first iPhone in 2007 which would not consume more
battery power than would be acceptable.
Jobs managed to persuade
Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive and a member of the Apple
board, to get YouTube to make videos available in the H.264 format
without a Flash "wrapper", as was then used for the desktop
implementation.
But the disagreements between Apple and Adobe
intensified, especially when Android devices began appearing which did
use the Flash plugin. Apple refused to use it, and banned apps from its
App Store which tried to use or include Flash.
In "Thoughts on Flash",
an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash
was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful
business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it
beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch
interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
"New
open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on
mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on
creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple
for leaving the past behind."
The next generation of mobile processors has arrived in the form of the NIVIDA Tegra 3, formerly known as Project Kal-El, a quad-core chipset with aspirations to dominate the Android landscape in 2012 as theTegra 2 dual-core processor dominatedthe majority of 2011. Though many of the details have already been revealed by NVIDIA before today on how Tegra 3 functions and is able to bring you the consumer more power, less battery consumption, and more effective workload distribution, this marks both the official naming of the chip as well as the official distribution of easy to process videos on how Tegra 3 will affect the average mobile device user.
NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset has been gone over in full detail by your humble narrator in two posts here on SlashGear just a few weeks ago in two posts, one on how there are actually[five cores, not just four], and another all about[Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing]aka vSMP. Note that back then NVIDIA had not yet revealed that the final market name for the processor would be “Tegra 3? at the time these posts were published, instead still using the codename “Project Kal-El” to identify the chipset. The most important thing you should take away from these posts is this: your battery life will be better and the distribution of power needed by your processor cores will be handled more intelligently.
NVIDIA has provided a few videos that will explain again in some rather easy to process detail what we’re dealing with here in the Tegra 3. The first of these videos shows visually what cores use which amount of power as several different tasks are performed. Watch as a high-powered game uses all four cores while browsing a webpage might only use a single core. This is the power of Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing in action.
NVIDIA Tegra 3: Fifth Companion Core
Next there’s a demonstration of an upcoming game that would never have been able to exist on a mobile platform if it hadn’t been for NVIDIA’s new chip architecture and the power of a quad-core chipset – along with NVIDIA’s twelve GPU cores of course. We had a look at this game back earlier this year in thefirst Glowball post– now we go underwater:
Glowball Video 2: Tegra 3 goes underwater
Finally there’s a lovely set of videos showing you exactly what it means for game developers and gamers to be working with the Tegra 3 chipset. The first video shows off how next-generation games are being made specifically for this chipset, developers working hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 so that gamers can get the most awesome experience in mobile history. Devour this, if you will:
NVIDIA Tegra 3: Developers bring Next-Generation Games to Mobile
You can also see several examples of the games in the video and how they’ve been improved in the Tegra 3 world.Riptide GPas well asShadowgunhave been reviewed and given hands-on videos by your humble narrator in the past – can’t wait for the enhanced visions! Next have a look at these games running side-by-side with their original versions. Make sure you’re sitting down, because you’re going to get pumped up.
Side-by-side Gameplay Competition vs Tegra 3
Down to the frames per second, this new chipset will change the world you live in as far as gaming goes. Of course it doesn’t stop there, but in that gaming is one of the best ways to test a processor on this platform, one made with gaming in mind of course, you’ve got to appreciate the power. Have a peek at this tiny chart to see what we mean:
Then head over to the post from ASUS on what the very first hardware running the Tegra 3 will look like. It’s theASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, a 10.1-inch tablet from the makers ofthe original Transformer, a device made to pummel the competition and usher in a whole new age in mobile computing. We look forward to the future, NVIDIA, bring on another year ofcomplete and total annihilationof the competition!
I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1
up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update
that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor
support patch - as well as prices and release & discontinuation
dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping
version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty -
well, not for Android users:
Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today. If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:
7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.
Also worth noting that each bar in the chart starts from the
first day of release - so it only gets worse for people who bought their
phone late in its sales period.
Why Is This So Bad?
This may be stating the obvious but there are at least three major reasons.
Consumers Get Screwed
Ever since the iPhone turned every smartphone into a blank slate, the
value of a phone is largely derived from the software it can run and
how well the phone can run it. When you’re making a 2 year commitment to
a device, it’d be nice to have some way to tell if the software was
going to be remotely current in a year or, heck, even a month. Turns out
that’s nearly impossible - here are two examples:
The Samsung Behold II on T-Mobile was the most expensive Android
phone ever and Samsung promoted that it would get a major update to
Eclair at least. But at launch the phone was already two major versions
behind — and then Samsung decided not to do the update after all, and it fell three major OS versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract today.
The Motorola Devour on Verizon launched with a Megan Fox Super Bowl ad, while reviews said it was “built to last and it delivers on features.”
As it turned out, the Devour shipped with an OS that was already
outdated. Before the next Super Bowl came around, it was three major
versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract until
sometime next year.
Developers Are Constrained
Besides the obvious platform fragmentation problems, consider this comparison: iOS developers, like Instapaper’s Marco Arment,
waited patiently until just this month to raise their apps’ minimum
requirement to the 11 month old iOS 4.2.1. They can do so knowing that
it’s been well over 3 years since anyone bought an iPhone that couldn’t
run that OS. If developers apply that same standard to Android, it will
be at least 2015 before they can start requiring 2010’s Gingerbread OS.
That’s because everyUScarrier is still selling - even just now introducing2
- smartphones that will almost certainly never run Gingerbread and
beyond. Further, those are phones still selling for actual upfront money
- I’m not even counting the generally even more outdated &
presumably much more popular free phones.
It seems this is one area the Android/Windows comparison holds up:
most app developers will end up targeting an ancient version of the OS
in order to maximize market reach.
Security Risks Loom
In the chart, the dashed line in the middle of each bar indicates how
long that phone was getting any kind of support updates - not just
major OS upgrades. The significant majority of models have received very
limited support after sales were discontinued. If a security or privacy
problem popped up in old versions of Android or its associated apps
(i.e. the browser), it’s hard to imagine that all of these
no-longer-supported phones would be updated. This is only less likely as
the number of phones that manufacturers would have to go back and deal
with increases: Motorola, Samsung, and HTC all have at least 20 models
each in the field already, each with a range of carriers that seemingly
have to be dealt with individually.
Why Don’t Android Phones Get Updated?
That’s a very good question. Obviously a big part of the problem is
that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the
carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to
devices. The hacker community (e.g. CyanogenMod, et cetera) has frequently managed to get these phones to run the newer operating systems, so it isn’t a hardware issue.
It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3
that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the
OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale,
they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really
the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2
year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender
much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly
well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).
In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to
make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android
phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you
really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this
may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist - it’s entirely
possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad
management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).
A Price Observation
All of the even slightly cheaper phones are much worse than the
iPhone when it comes to OS support, but it’s interesting to note that
most of the phones on this list were actually not cheaper than the
iPhone when they were released. Unlike the iPhone however, the
“full-priced” phones are frequently discounted in subsequent months. So
the “low cost” phones that fueled Android’s generally accepted price
advantage in this period were basically either (a) cheaper from the
outset, and ergo likely outdated & terribly supported or (b)
purchased later in the phone’s lifecycle, and ergo likely outdated &
terribly supported.
Also, at any price point you’d better love your rebates. If you’re
financially constrained enough to be driven by upfront price, you can’t
be that excited about plunking down another $100 cash and waiting weeks
or more to get it back. And sometimes all you’re getting back is a “$100 Promotion Card” for your chosen provider. Needless to say, the iPhone has never had a rebate.
Along similar lines, a very small but perhaps telling point: the
price of every single Android phone I looked at ended with 99 cents -
something Apple has never done (the iPhone is $199, not $199.99). It’s
almost like a warning sign: you’re buying a platform that will
nickel-and-dime you with ads and undeletable bloatware, and it starts
with those 99 cents. And that damn rebate form they’re hoping you don’t
send in.
Notes on the chart and data
Why stop at June 2010?
I’m not going to. I do think that having 15 months or so of history
gives a good perspective on how a phone has been treated, but it’s also
just a labor issue - it takes a while to dredge through the various
sites to determine the history of each device. I plan to continue on and
might also try to publish the underlying table with references. I also
acknowledge that it’s possible I’ve missed something along the way.
Android Release Dates
For the major Android version release dates, I used the date at
which it was actually available on a normal phone you could get via
normal means. I did not use the earlier SDK release date, nor the date
at which ROMs, hacks, source, et cetera were available.
Outside the US
Finally, it’s worth noting that people outside the US have often had
it even worse. For example, the Nexus One didn’t go on sale in Europe
until 5 months after the US, the Droid/Milestone FroYo update happened
over 7 months later there, and the Cliq never got updated at all outside
of the US.
Thanks primarily to CNET & Wikipedia for the list of phones.?
Yes, AT&T committed to Gingerbread updates
for its 2011 Android phones, but only those that had already been
released at the time of the July 25 press release. The Impulse doesn’t
meet that criterion. Nor does the Sharp FX Plus.?
Outside of its remarkable sales, the real star of the iPhone 4S show
has been Siri, Apple’s new voice recognition software. The intuitive
voice recognition software is the closest to A.I. we’ve seen on a
smartphone to date.
Over the weekend I noted
that Siri has some resemblance to the IBM supercomputer, Watson, and
speculated that someday Watson would be in our pockets while the
supercomputers of the future might look a lot more like the Artificial
Intelligence we’ve read about in science fiction novels today, such as
the mysterious Wintermute from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Over at Wired, John Stokes explains how Siri and the Apple cloud could lead to the advent of a real Artificial Intelligence:
In
the traditional world of canned, chatterbot-style “AI,” users had to
wait for a software update to get access to new input/output pairs. But
since Siri is a cloud application, Apple’s engineers can continuously
keep adding these hard-coded input/output pairs to it. Every time an
Apple engineer thinks of a clever response for Siri to give to a
particular bit of input, that engineer can insert the new pair into
Siri’s repertoire instantaneously, so that the very next instant every
one of the service’s millions of users will have access to it. Apple
engineers can also take a look at the kinds of queries that are popular
with Siri users at any given moment, and add canned responses based on
what’s trending.
In this way, we can expect Siri’s repertoire of clever
comebacks to grow in real-time through the collective effort of hundreds
of Apple employees and tens or hundreds of millions of users, until it
reaches the point where an adult user will be able to carry out a
multipart exchange with the bot that, for all intents and purposes,
looks like an intelligent conversation.
Meanwhile, the technology undergirding the software and iPhone
hardware will continue to improve. Now, this may not be the AI we had in
mind, but it also probably won’t be the final word in Artificial
Intelligence either. Other companies, such as IBM, are working to
develop other ‘cognitive computers‘ as well.
And while the Singularity may indeed be far, far away, it’s still exciting to see how some forms of A.I. may emerge at least in part through cloud-sourcing.
While voice control has been part of Android since the dawn of time, Siri
came along and ruined the fun with its superior search and
understanding capabilities. However, an industrious team of folks from Dexetra.com, led by Narayan Babu, built a Siri-alike in just 8 hours during a hackathon.
Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions,
art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?”
and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned
friends.
The app will soon be available soon from the Android Marketplace but I
tried it recently and found it a bit sparse but quite cool. It uses
Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand basic questions and
Narayan and his buddies are improving the app all the time.
The coolest thing? The finished the app in eight hours.
When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and
started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input,
Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late
evening we decided on the name “iris.”, which would be Siri in reverse.
And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival
Imitator of Siri. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started
using it the results were actually good, really good.
You can grab the early, early beta APK here
but I recommend waiting for the official version to arrive this week.
It just goes to show you that amazing things can pop up everywhere.