This is fun. The number one iOS carrier duking it out with the company behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system. Last month, Google's lead for the Android Open Source Project, Jean-Baptiste Queru, more or less blamed carriers (see comments) for Android's upgrade woes. Yesterday, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson retaliated, blaming Google for the delays. And yes, Google already responded to that, too.
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Member since:2011-01-28
phoehne,
"If you walk down a laundry detergent aisle you see 'new improved' on several products with very minor differences in formulation or packaging. If you like, it's the physics of the market and the manufacturer that didn't come out with a model every few months would be seen as 'stale' by the market. They would only lose market share."
Haha, that reminds me of shopping at CVS for toiletries I've bought for years. The products never change (which is what I want), yet just about every single item is always labeled "new and improved". It's totally meaningless marketing drivel.
It makes me wonder whether the population really is so fickle as to react to the presence or absence of the "new and improved" label, or if it is just the result of corporate employees who are desperate to justify their jobs by changing formulas by a few parts per million and collecting their paychecks.
Edited 2012-05-10 13:54 UTC
Member since:2010-03-08
I do not say that phone manufacturers need to be forced to stick with "pure" Android here, but that unmodified Android should work on all Android-compatible cellphones out of the box, in a reduced functionality mode, just like OSs do on x86 PCs.
Imagine for a second what installing a Windows or Linux distro upgrade would be like if the x86 ecosystem was anything like the ARM ecosystem.
First, you have to find out how OSs are installed on your specific computer, since there is no standard Esc, Del or F1 key that you can hold pressed to boot from an external storage medium. It is at least manufacturer-specific, and often model-specific. No indication displayed at boot will help you.
Then, you have to acquire the full documentation of the SOC that inside your computer uses, and spend weeks tweaking the source code of your freshly bought OS until it merely boots and displays a crappy command-line shell.
After that, you will finally be able to install hardware manufacturer-provided drivers (the OS manufacturer cannot include all of them, since due to ARM fragmentation, the result would be waaaay too big for an embedded NAND chip), praying that these have been adapted to the latest OS ABI. If not, you will also need to write wrappers, and spend hours debugging them and optimizing their performance until they behave reasonably well.
And at the point, all you have is a working install of the vanilla OS. OEMs still have to port all their customizations to the new OS, making use of the new APIs etc... Under these circumstances, is it so strange that Android updates take so much time after Google have released the latest source ?
Edited 2012-05-10 17:48 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2006-08-26
See my comment above for a phone specific analysis, but what you're suggesting won't work. The economic model is called 'monopolistic competition.' The phones are slightly different, but 95% the same, like laundry detergent. If you walk down a laundry detergent aisle you see "new improved" on several products with very minor differences in formulation or packaging. If you like, it's the physics of the market and the manufacturer that didn't come out with a model every few months would be seen as "stale" by the market. They would only lose market share.