And another case of the internet apparently wielding more influence than it seems to. To much dismay, Samsung announced last week that several of its popular smartphones, most notably the Samsung Galaxy S, would not be getting an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. The internet backlash was palpable, and today, word on the street is that Samsung is reconsidering its position.
Due to the Galaxy S only sporting 512MB RAM, Samsung stated it was impossible to update these devices to Ice Cream Sandwich without sacrificing TouchWiz and associated applications. While many geeks would say “good riddance!”, the fact of the matter is that offering an upgrade that removes said applications is not going to go down well with consumers, opening Samsung up to all sorts of legal nastiness.
So, assuming this is indeed true, I can somewhat sympathise with Samsung’s initial position.
Still, the Galaxy S entered the market only 18 months ago, and the Galaxy Tab 12 months ago. Cutting these expensive devices off from support so soon is simply bad business sense, and the backlash on the web was pretty huge. The usual petitions, angry Android fansites, and so on; they do seem to have helped.
Korean websites are reporting that Samsung is reconsidering its position due to strong consumer demand, but that it still needs to find some way around the 512MB RAM limitation. My suggestion would be to offer a TouchWiz-less upgrade to ICS, but make it optional – so that those that know they’re getting stuff taken away can agree to it specifically.
For now, there’s nothing final, but I highly doubt Samsung would let it out they’re “reconsidering” if they’re not going to actually, you know, reconsider.
I think this is how certain kinds of marketing research are conducted by prominent market players these days in our heavily networked world. You announce something that looks like your firm decision, then observe public reaction on the Internet and make the real decision.
There is something so very wrong with the whole mobile market if in the span of 18 months, 512 MB of RAM on something in your pocket is not “big enough” for *anything*.
Cripes! It’s madness. I had 512 MB of RAM on my PC a decade ago, it was way more than enough then, and you can still comfortably run the latest Firefox on Windows XP in 512 MB of RAM now.
With throwaway hardware comes throwaway software. It sickens me.
Edited 2011-12-27 16:47 UTC
Just when the arms race on desktop computing seems to have plateaued, up comes Android to start one for mobile devices.
I bet we’ll be seeing liquid-cooled smartphones by the time Android Jellybean (or whatever it’s called) comes out.
Windows XP is the keyword here. We are talking about running the latest version of a computer’s OS. And Windows 7 would run very badly with only 512 MB.
OS bloat existed before mobile devices. The only apparent reason why we start to care now is that in the mobile world, old OS support seemingly sucks bigtime, to the point where one would have to upgrade the whole OS in order to fix a few glitches and exploits here and there. Kind of like if Microsoft forced you to upgrade a WinXP install to Windows 7 in order to fix some random WMF vulnerability.
Edited 2011-12-27 23:38 UTC
Neolander,
Ideally, the OS would be designed to be little more than an extremely fast, lightweight & transparent API. Everything else should be an application running on top, including the primary launcher/shell. This way one could always update to the latest secure kernel without also updating the heavy UI components which perform poorly on older hardware.
Unfortunately ms and apple are both extremely guilty of setting a terrible precedent with regards to bundling the UI & kernel.
I have some trouble understanding what you call an OS here.
If you are saying that kernels should be lightweight, and that everything else should be an independent, easily replaceable application, then I agree.
If you are saying that an operating system, as a complete and ready to use product that is distributed as such, should feature as little API and applications as possible, to the point of leaving the job of designing the user interface to third parties, then I somewhat disagree. It’s good to have a standard bundled package, although everything should be easily replaceable.
To say it otherwise : I understand the need for a modern desktop OS to feature a web browser, but I can’t accept Microsoft’s tendency to shoehorn IE everywhere in Windows so that replacing or removing it becomes impossible.
It’s not the RAM that matters, it’s the ROM size, and how the ROM is partitioned.
Supposedly, there’s not enough room in the apps partition for ICS + TouchWiz.
Why there are hard-coded partition sizes in 2010+ is beyond me.
To be fair, most of the past software left much to be desired, too… (we just largely don’t remember the trash that ~always flooded the place; most of it was ignored by us even back then, justifiably so)
Plus, the last decade was quite peculiar with PCs, we largely got into “good enough” territory – which absolutely wasn’t the case just a short few years earlier, so hardware was also sort of throwaway (and software had issues) / changing a bit too rapidly.
Yes, a decade-old PC can do essentially all that a typical “new” PC does, if some basic care is given to the choice of efficient software. Browsing, music, IM, videophone, videos (last two just at lower, but still fine res), basic document editing – no problem, I know, I keep one such machine around. Even video editing could be not much of an issue, if via a small trick of proxy editing (doing it on low resolution version of footage, at the end exporting changes in full), the only major “sacrifice” being recent games (but 1. most people don’t play 2. until recently, most new machines would also struggle)
Something analogous a decade ago, even on merely 5 year old (then) PC, would be much harder. Rewind the clock again …not even another full decade, just half, and it probably gets into impossible. Those were the times when new usage patterns were exploding, undoubtedly also because the then-new hardware finally allowed them.
Where the hell did that RAM limit come from?
The manufacturers always make up an absurd HW limitation, then Google has to go on record saying there are really no such hardware requirements from them.
Also, the 2011 Sony (Ericsson) phones are all getting ICS and they all have 512 RAM (128 of which is reserved for the GPU). And these phones have some customization too.
Edited 2011-12-27 16:52 UTC
Well, at least from the summary, it seems they believe 512MB is necessary for the applications they loaded on it, and they only delivered 512MB on the device, which is not upgradeable so customers are stuck with 512MB.
It may be they have found 512MB had the best price/performance ratio when they pushed it out, but didn’t take account what may be happening in the future for Android – no surprise, they’d rather sell you and upgraded model than do that kind of planning.
So it’s really their own artificial limit – the solution is to make the software more resource friendly (CPU, memory, etc.) but would require actual work, and to have programmers that actually cared about those things, and managers that would listen instead of the usual “Get it out the door” approach.
Strange attitudes nowadays if angry fanboy mobs can invoke a policy change and force an update of a imho dead device. Must be some strange aggro behavior from Afrika floating around.
But lets see how faithfull the reconsidering is ( I just look at the GoDadddy case some days ago)…
Whaddaya mean dead? It is less than 18 months old and was top of the range. If ever there was a device that deserves an update it is this one…
Wow, 512mb requirement. My first Windows 2000 ME pc used only 256mb ram, and I ran Windows office and everything on it.
Windows 2000 ME?
The best version of windows mixed with the worst version of windows…
It’s another way of saying “Windows XP”
I want my Android 2.2.1 back! Newer version 2.3.2. is prone to shut down and blackscreen randomly. I blame Linux kernel for this- memory hungry piece of shit.
I too have issues with my Galaxy S SCH-I500 running the stock 2.3.5 such as the screen turning on randomly which is most annoying at night when you’re driving down the road. In addition it will periodically come so unresponsive that I have to pull the battery to regain control. The cherry on top is the camera takes so long to take a picture, whatever you think you got a picture of is not what you got a picture of. I thought my HTC was crappy and this phone was better but the truth is they both suck even at the one thing they should be good at: just being a phone. Battery what? I have to pull out a hand crank to keep these phones sparking for longer than a 15 minute phone call (yes I exaggerated that number, but the battery life of every android phone I’ve owned has been terrible). What’s worse is that the crappy battery lives of the phones on the market now seem to be reducing peoples expectations, frequently seeing people commenting “Man I can get 7 hours of my phone it’s great!” F*** that, less than 2 days without a charge for minimal usage is unacceptable. I’ve had blackberry phones that lasted easily 2 days sometimes more with fairly heavy usage, barely making it through work hours without a charge just doesn’t cut it.
These phones initially had that “Oooo shiney” affect on me but I’ve grown tired of them quickly. Pretty sure I won’t get another android phone until this bad taste leaves my mouth. Back to Blackberry I guess, they might be a lost cause but at least they still sell some quality devices compared to the craptastic phones I’ve been toting around the last year.
I understand that HTC has their UI Samsung has Touchwiz. But I am not familiar with what is Touchwiz?
Because I don’t know, it seems like it is Android standard with Samsung Swype keyboard.
What is different? What would I miss if I used one of the mods in future eg CyanogenMod 9.
To me HTC’s sense looks obviously different.
I might start to like Samsung if they don’t kill off support too soon anymore.
Why not release new stock firmwares for each device for lets say 12 months, and then build an aosp version and open source all drivers, 5his way you leave the option for the power users to naintain your old devices as long as they want. Sure you wont sell every new device to every power user out there, but knowing rhis, we will feel a lot more conftable buying the next device we teen realy buy from you again.
I would definitely love to buy a device from any vendor, knowing that there will be aosp available when the official life cycle has ended.
Edited 2011-12-28 05:31 UTC
… but this is one of the reasons for me sticking to iPhone.
It has been said,/heard/seen before, all these Android phones not getting any updates, even if they have only been on the market for (example given) 12 months or so.
In my opinion, all these Android phones running TouchWiz, Sense, and other custom skins are just bundling unnecessary bloatware. I can’t understand why these phone manufacturers can’t simply ship vanilla Android? It’s certainly good enough for the Nexus range (superior in my opinion) so why not for everyone else? Why aren’t these custom interfaces optional components that users can install only if they choose? Forcing these unwelcome customizations to Android is no different than computer manufacturers shipping myriad crapware with new computers and no longer including a proper Windows installation disk as a result of their meddling. The reason for restore partitions is so that all the crapware and manufacturer customizations get restored too. Why isn’t this illegal? Manufacturers want to rope users in and then maintain a stranglehold on the devices once they’re sold. My question is this: who really owns my tech, me or the manufacturer?
“Skins” seem to be how mobile manufacturers try to find some way to differentiate themselves, they don’t want to become just ~like PC OEMs. Also not doing, software-wise, quite the same things as the PC ones – adding to the OS not some trash mostly lurking on the sidelines, but top-down customization, “new” UI, which hopefully (in their eyes) will make people “used to” them.
Anyway, there are manufacturers hardly doing any modifications – and yeah, they might as well take over …coming largely from the same place where PCs are made: ZTE, Huawei (those two perhaps not visible too much, but with explosive growth), partly LG.
PS. And “superiority” of Nexus has a hefty price tag, for vast majority of people it’s most likely better to get 3-4x less expensive handset (for example, from one of the 3 mentioned above) and replace it only slightly sooner than a Nexus would dictate (anyway, I suspect that an average Nexus owner is among the “often upgrading” half)
Sony was able to remove OtherOS (Linux) from their PS3 via an update and didn’t get in any legal trouble.
Maybe not, but they sure as hell pissed off the hacker community! I would consider that worse than legal trouble!