Motorola Droid X Disappointments
Linked by gsyoungblood on Tue 20th Jul 2010 18:01 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless On July 15th the latest Android super-phone was released by Motorola and Verizon Wireless. All hail the Droid X. The release was not without controversy though. The Droid X, while greatly raising the bar for Android phones in general, does so at the expense of the very power users and community that made the original Droid the gotta-have phone it became. Alienating this group may have far reaching consequences for Motorola.
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werpu
Member since:
2006-01-18

At the moment the Nexus One probably still a favourite to Android users who want as much flexibility in running what they want, but which next generation devices are we supposed to get?

I've got an HTC Hero, and I'll be ready for an upgrade in the next few months. I'll probably wait until Android 3.0 is here, and I'll want a device which is considered to be a successor to the Nexus One. I want to be able to root it, to run whatever firmware I want, with fanatic support with Android operating system updates.

Is anyone going to provide me with such a phone?

This is my fear with Android, they started off with great phones which were pretty open, now we're getting locked phones where the users are restricted with what they can run. Newer Android phones need to be hacked in some way to get full access to them, compared to the Nexus One where a few legitimate commands will give you full control over the device.

Supposedly Google aren't going to sell a successor to the Nexus One. Personally I'm not too sure on this, they'll need a device to test out the next generation of Android with, a developer device which they may only sell in a similar way to the G1 - to registered users only.

I'm willing to pay the full upfront cost for my next Android device - if the right one comes along. However it seems like all the current manufacturers are more interested taking steps backwards in terms of what we can do with Android phones.


Actually the Android phones were never open, the only devices which were were the G1 dev phone, the Droid (the Milestone already has the crippled bootloader, which is the GSM version of the Droid) and the Nexus one. In all three cases Google was the reason for the phones being semi open.
My personal guess is, that google always will have one dev phone or the other, as reference platform as long as it is important. I expect the development to slow down significantly post Android 3.0. Face it the OS with 2.2 has become more or less feature complete 3.0 will bring following, totally overhauled UI and modularisation, which means lots of the infrastructure will be updatable over the shop, after that having to upgrade to the latest Android OS will not be as important as it is anymore. I also do not expect Google to update the N1 anythime soon. Google soon will start to sell the N1 as next official dev phone over their dev shop and the hardware still has not outlived its full potential, it simply is that good, that there are still some untapped features left like 720p recording and Radio and also real 3d acceleration on the UI side of things.

So if you want to stay on the safe side, my bet is the N1 still will be the phone until end 2012 after that Google might roll the next generation of dev phones. As for the rest of the manufacturers simply it is like that either buy it and be left alone after 6-8 months or simply do not buy it no matter how flashy and shiny their stuff seems to be.

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