“Conventional wisdom suggests that, just like Gingerbread in 2010 and ICS in 2011, the next version of Android could make an appearance sometime in the fourth quarter of 2012. But the current state of the Android ecosystem indicates that this might not be the best course of action for Google, its OEMs or their customers. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at why Google should stick with Android 4.1 until 2013, and push Android forward with hardware, not software later in the year.” Fully agreed. Give the ecosystem some time to catch its breath. I mean, it’s not as if the competition has anything groundbreaking up its sleeve – iOS and Android are so close these days.
I think Cyanogenmod has so many cool enhancements that everybody should have. I don’t know why doesn’t everybody want fine grained permission management?
Why should I allow games to download and display ads? Why should I give them my location? etc
That are things the uninformed can live with, I don’t want to.With CM I can say: No Rovio, you have earned enough, I need my bandwidth and my battery for myself. That maybe elitist, but I just don’t care. Those are the perks you get from using an open system.
And CM offers so much more. There is something for everybody.
Rovio: “But, dear Kragil, if You are so interested in bandwidth and battery life then, in the name of all that’s holy, do NOT play our games! You know, why should we give you our game (that cost real money to make) for free to play? We even show some goodwill and give You our game “for free” if we can show some ads alongside the game (to recoup some costs, you know), but no, even that is too much to ask from you cheapskates…ah screw it, iCustomers are much more willing to pay directly for games anyway!”
Rovio are dumb bastards in my opinion, how would they even know, if they don’t provide adfree payed versions so one can choose?
Yadda, yadda. Stupid BS. I bought Angry Birds Space, but the others I cannot buy and I am not willing to have ads ruining my gameplay and battery life.
And why the hell do they need to know my location?? I want my privacy and only CM allows me to control what apps get to know what. I bought many apps. I prefer donating to FOSS apps, but some games I just like. I’m only human, but I like my privacy, battery life and good gameplay even more.
And btw Rovio makes much more money on Android.
Edited 2012-07-11 11:56 UTC
My god, you sound like a 6-year-old spoiled kid. Your parents should have given you less gifts at christmas.
Then don’t install them!
You want to have it both ways, and you whine when you can’t. Childish.
…So what, Robin Hood? You courageously rob the rich, ahah! To give to… Yourself. Oh.
Bla, again BS. I don’t steal. I could just turn off internet access for the whole phone and then play, but that would be highly inconvient. Having a good way to manage the permissions is much better. But all you IOS fanboys think the way Apple handles things, by removing powers from the user and giving it to themselves is the solution. Then it is really the binary choice you present, you either eat their stuff and be a happy sheep or you just don’t. There is no middle ground.
Not my cup of tea, I want a system where I am in control and I have the final say about what happens with my data.
But downloading and displaying ads use a negligible amount of your precious mAh compared to the game itself, and very little bandwidth. If you don’t agree with how Rovio make their money, don’t use their products. Use Free software if you’re a cheapskate.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17431109
A new four core Nexus would be nice, but there are a lot of things to do on the software side as well. E.g. user profiles so that a tablet easily could be shared or passed around in the family. Handwriting recognition from an active stylus would be nice too, and that would of course require both software and hardware. Face recognition of faces in your pictures so that they could be tagged by name of the persons in them, as soon as you named the person on one picture. Perhaps support for openVPN, or support for SELinux. There are a lot of things they could do.
Edited 2012-07-11 00:41 UTC
Why? What would you gain from those extra 2 cores? (besides a way to get your battery to 0% in an hour)
But the market demands that phones be paper-thin! Evidently the market doesn’t mind having to be close to a power outlet after an hour of use. You can always put in a software switch that can turn off all those extra cores since no phone software needs them, but they must be available in case you should ever need to do something on your phone that requires 4/8/16 cores, although I can’t imagine what that could ever be. If it’s games, then I would not be playing a game that required that much hardware graphics power on a little tiny 4″ screen where I couldn’t see the detail in the first place.
Edited 2012-07-11 08:24 UTC
I think a Key Lime Pie release would be welcomed in one of two ways..
Another big performance upgrade with a short list of new features. and/OR an upgrade that somehow swallowed Chrome OS. Turning Android into an OS that’s running on phone/tablet/TV/PC. The latter would be mostly transparent for devices other than Chromebooks.
Note: I haven’t really played around with ChromeOS, other than just booting it up and initial 5 minutes of use.
…I disagree. It’s not Google’s fault the carriers are f*cking up every single time they know a new release is pending. What do you want them to do? Stop innovating? When the time is right, Google will realize it won’t need to release so many updates because the platform will be mature (and they will slow down with the releases). But so far, this is not the case, so frequent update are welcome.
It’s pretty much common knowledge by now that if you care anything about staying on the bleeding edge on Android, then you buy a Nexus phone and tell these other vendors to take their bloatware-filled FrankenAndroid phones and shove them up their asses. So if you buy an HTC Amaze Vibrant 4G LTE Touch Prime, then you already know you’re going to get shafted when it comes to updates. That means all Verizon customers are pretty much screwed from here on out, cuz you’re probably never gonna see another Nexus device on that network again, and it’s arguable whether or not the one they have now is even worthy of the name Nexus.
That being said, what do I want from Google? If the Nexus is the only REAL Android phone I have to choose from, I wish Google would release a couple more high-end phones. Even when it came out, the Nexus wasn’t exactly cutting-edge, and the camera is sub-par at best. And the radio (at least on the Verizon version) absolutely sucks ass.
You can’t just buy a prepaid/postpaid SIM card for Verizon and put it in your Nexus?
No you can’t. Verizon isn’t a GSM operator. CDMA operators are archaic. You have to activate service through the operator and if the MEID (CDNA’s equivalent of the phone’s IMEI) isn’t in their database of approved devices, they won’t activate it and you’ll end up with a pocket sized WiFi-only tablet.
In a manner of speaking, but VZW has the best coverage of any carrier in the US, esp in rural areas. (Which is, unfortunately, where a lot of my family lives.) So in the future, I gotta make a choice… do I want a decent Android phone, or do I want to have a signal when I drive outside of city limits.
Not all CDMA2000* operators are archaic like you describe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removable_User_Identity_Module
Apparently not China Telecom, for example (so probably one of the largest CDMA2k carriers; not like there are that many of them); generally, IIRC, such “SIM card” is fairly standard in Asian networks.
* I really wish they didn’t use a trademark so similar to the name of a basic radio method used by… everybody. Inevitably shortened just to the name of that radio method, and occasionally leading to silly confusion.
Wow, for real? That’s embarrassing, really. you guys really are a 3rd world country when it comes to mobile.
It is hard for Google to compete with its own OEM. The Nexus is a balancing act, they need to stimulate the OEM without eating into their revenue.
And the high-end tier is where most of the revenue comes from.
I doubt it’s common knowledge …and anyway, not strictly true – Nexus phones also had some hiccups with updates. It’s probably best to get one of the more popular Cyanogenmod target devices.
These are HTC’s and Samsung’s high-end stuff, right ?
(The precision might be useful, as Cyanogenmod supports *many* phones nowadays…)
TBH, the slight vagueness was kinda on purpose, to avoid any future liability
But yeah, more or less those. Too bad, really – I would expect the usually cheapskate (and I mean it in a fully positive sense! I’m like that…) ~OSS people to focus more on mass-market devices. Meanwhile, it looks like CM9 will be mostly limited to high-end stuff.
At least, over time, some mass-market devices do show up in CM official support (ZTE Blade most notably, or LG Optimus One; though both will be probably stuck at 7.2, as far as official CM goes). And ZTE Blade II (which, hw-wise, appears to be the mass-market device I’ve been waiting for) seems to already have Android 4.0 support from the manufacturer; Autumn (when more mass-market ICS devices will likely show up) might be interesting.
Well, I guess that the top CM contributors, who can afford to spend a lot of time on the project, have well-paid jobs which allow them to buy expensive gadgets.
That said, as a cheapskate Sony Ericsson customer, I can’t complain so far. Since the company has opened up its bootloaders, the FreeXperia team has done well, though progress hasn’t been as fast as, say, on the Galaxy S II, where Thom had rock-solid CM9 builds months ago (at the time, FXP’s CM9 builds for my handset still had issues with basic GSM functionality).
The biggest problems are the relative scarcity of the documentation (due to device unpopularity probably), FXP’s tendency to use terrible mirrors for their builds, and Sony’s silly idea to release different phones with similar names (e.g. Mini Pro X10 vs Mini Pro).
Still OTOH there’s a legion of quite talented people scattered throughout the world, in less prosperous places. Too bad their efforts seem less coordinated, less focused.
Oh well, I hope CM (or some other similar project, similarly active) will realise what kinds of phones will really push Android uptake. Only, I’m afraid the main activity (or even language of builds) will be in Russian or Chinese
(and maybe even there already is such movement particularly in the latter, but not spilling through to the world web…)
Meanwhile, changing mass-market handsets to the one with quite current CM support is also quite feasible – with reselling the old one, and much lower prices overall, it still ends up less expensive than Nexus or high-end phones in general.
Of course, might be less feasible for people and places
locked into contracts… (which I imagine is another factor influencing what kinds of phones are best supported)
They should sort out issues with their Play Store before even thinking about the new version.
1. Cleanup. Why would anyone want 642 fart apps?
2. Better vetting; for security and device compatibility.
3. Improve content (movie, music, mag) for non-US users.
4. Introduce some sort of gift card system.
5. Better overall interface, speed and search.
Stop innovating, just ask Microsoft how that worked out for them and Windows Mobile.
We want Bluetooth DUN natively!
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=16717
Would this be so you can’t avoid going through the google spy — errr gate keeper and bypass their ability to track your every breath?
I sometime can’t help getting the feeling that any networking capabilities apart from http are intentionally kept out of android for this reason. Maybe I’m being paranoid?
The linux kernel has native built in ability to connect to any number of network protocols (cifs, nfs) yet they’re all broken why?
Why does everything need to go through google and its spy ridden crap network? Hell I can’t even retrieve weather updates without revealing my location, why is that?
Anyhoo, the article is right. We don’t need another android version. We don’t even need the one we’ve got!
*facepalm*
*bigger facepalm*
Now, now, don’t be so hard on him – retrieving weather reports for the whole planet is obviously not an unreasonable solution…