'Zactly… The phone hardware manufacturers have little incentive to do the work to test/tweak the updated OS versions on their phones, since that prolongs the life of old hardware instead of selling a new phone. If they do finally put out an update, then the carriers drag their feet… they couldn’t possibly release a clean update without stuffing their bloatware and custom crapola in, so they may or may not ever get around to it at all.
Example: My step-son has the same model phone as I do, but on a different carrier. We noticed differences in the icons for quickly enabling/disabling GPS, WiFi, etc. Looking further, even the menus & options under Settings were different. Big can of WTF?
Form the preview of their new smartwatch, it doesn’t look bad - less cost and less complicated seems like it could be a winner. But it will require Android 4.3 or later. Awww.
Yeah, Android’s carrier madness is so blatantly, absurdly anti-consumer that I don’t know how anyone could put up with it. Love Apple or hate them, they at least deserve props for bullying the carriers into staying completely out of their firmware—and I can load the latest iOS revision onto four-year old iPhones without problem (and it even works…mostly).
Being beholden to a carrier for an update sucks. I’d go with a Nexus device if I had to go Android. It just seems like the only sane option.
I love my Nexus 7 tablet (gen 2). My phone is a hand-me-down from Sunbeam which is dying. I’m thinking about going to a dumb flip phone next. I don’t want to spend the money to stay current on a premium smartphone just to keep my life from being compromised through it. Not when I can’t even carry it until after the workday. (Reference our earlier conversation on this topic.)
Yeah, I’ve got a Nexus 5 and love the fact that I get rapid updates.
Of course, it’s not just Android that has the update problem. I remember back in days of the Nokia smartphones it needed the network to roll out upgrades to their branded handsets then too. I learned then to buy unlocked where possible, which I think is where Apple have won in that they’ve historically not allowed branding.
Seems to be working here—I’m watching the preview pane fill in as I type right now. But I’ll go ahead and poke it with a sharp stick just to make sure all is well.
