Why you should be careful about buying Android devices .

I thought the following article was a good article to share as one of the weaknesses of the Android platform is it is very fragmented and you don’t know when, or even if, an update to a later version of the Android operating system will be made available for your device.

Motorola offered no consolation today for the many UK-based owners of its Xoom Wi-Fi-only tablet who feel let down because OS updates made available in the US have not come to this country.... Read More

If you are purchasing an Android device you should probably assume that what you buy today is the device you end up with. Hoping that perhaps your tablet which is an Android 2.1 device will be upgradeable to Android 3 is one way to be disappointed.

Apple users can be largely confident the device they buy today will perhaps obtain one or two iterations of the new operating system. In the case of the iPhone 3GS I have, when iOS4 was released I noticed one feature was purposely not included and that was the Find iPhone feature. There was no reason technically it wasn’t include so this was a marketing decision to encourage people to buy a newer mobile phone. I now have the feature installed on the 3GS as a result of my short-lived ownership of an iPad 2. With a new iPhone being released at roughly 12 month intervals, that means you can probably expect you’ll be able to run the latest iOS operating system for around two years. After that it is anyone’s guess. To put a figure on this it means your iPhone if you replaced it after two years is costing you around $400-$500 a year.

I recently purchased a $99 Android mobile phone for testing purposes which I consider to be great. If the operating system isn’t updated from 2.2 it isn’t a big deal at that type of cost. As long as the mobile phone does what it needs to do, at about a tenth of the price of an iPhone you can’t ask for more, and really, it does a great deal already.

Android users really shouldn’t be in a position where they don’t know if the next version of the operating system will be available for their tablet or mobile phone. This to me really is a poor design decision on the part of Google and the manufacturers. It should just be a matter of when it is available it can be downloaded. If your device is no longer supported, it has reached the end of its update cycle. Currently this area is a real mess and is something Android users need to think about seriously. The best way to handle this is to plan for the worst (that is there won’t be an upgrade so what you bought is it) and be pleasantly surprised when an upgrade is available.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au