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Published in Mobiles

Latest iOS5 works on two year old 3GS

by on01 November 2011



Android updates usually last haft of that


A few days ago we found a great comparison of Apple phones vs US Android phones and the fact that Apple is doing much better than Android when it comes to future OS support. The other day we mentioned that Windows 7.5 is available on most, if not all Windows 7 phones, so Microsoft is going strong in the update department as well.

Android on the other hand doesn’t do that well when it comes updates, even on relatively new phones. A perfect example is the world’s first dual-core phone, LG Optimus 2X that is getting its Gingerbread update today, almost a year after it launched on Google’s Nexus S. LG Optimus 2X launched with Froyo Android 2.2 and it took them more than six months to update it to Android 2.3. Android 4.0 for phones will likely never happen for the first dual-core phone to hit the market. So much for LG’s management and marketing strategy, killing hope for future upgrades after just six months on the market.

The iPhone 3GS on the other hand can run iOS 5, a brand new operating system that launched a few weeks ago. So, iPhone 3GS launched in June 2009 and still has the latest OS support. Of course, the iPhone 4 also gets iOS 5 support and naturally latest greatest iPhone 4S runs the current OS and possibly iOS 6 when that becomes available.

Let’s choose a phone from that time, HTC Magic that launched in February 2009. It was launched with Android 1.6 Donut and later it was upgradable officially to Android 2.2 Froyo, but it never got Gingerbread Android 2.3 and its pointless to mention that it will officially never see Android 4.0. HTC Hero launched in June 2009 launched with Android 1.5 Cupcake and Android 2.1 Éclair and it never even got an official update to Android 2.2, not to mention the later. Good thing is that mod community makes sure that there is an unsupported, unofficial upgrade path that got Froyo and Gingerbread on this phone. One of the top selling Android phones of 2010, Samsung’s Galaxy S, launched with Froyo in June 2010. It was updated to Gingebread a year later, more than six months after the OS was introduced on the Nexus S, which is based on the Galaxy S.

Believe it or not Apple beats the Android community as a whole in terms of upgrades and so does Microsoft with Windows Phone 7 and 7.5, despite the fact that Windows Phone is a relative newcomer in the market. Android is a much more fragmented ecosystem and Google’s loose hardware requirements obviously cause issues.

Make sure to check the chart in the article here, to see how bad things look for the Android community, not to mention how the issue reflects on Google.



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