I’m always hearing news about new Android devices coming out; people are talking about how much faster and better the next one is going to be. Authors and tech enthusiasts all over the internet are always talking about the next best thing in the Android phone world. The next best thing for Android is always around the corner, and it comes and goes pretty quickly. I can’t really get excited about it anymore because there’s never enough time to really enjoy the newness of the handsets that come out. You buy a brand new Android phone and two months later it’s not even cool or new anymore.

 

The phones also become faster and more powerful so quickly, that your phone quickly becomes slower than it was when you got it. The newest phones have 1GB of RAM and 1.2GHz Dual-Core Processors. Last year’s 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM phones can’t really compete with today’s phones, and ,according to Moore’s law, it’s only going to get worse. So the phone that everyone says is going to be so great is not so great for very long. What’s the point of signing a 2 year contract for a phone that is going to be slow and very outdated in 1 year. That’s what you get with an Android phone.


Another problem with Android phones is the fragmentation. This means that different phones are running different versions of Android, and there are many different screen sizes and custom skins(HTC’s Sense UI, Motorola’s “Blur etc.). The combination of these things, along with the different internal capabilities of the processor and so on, make Android very difficult to get behind. Depending on the phone you buy, it’s hard to know what the quality of it is going to be in 6 months or a year. You never know when your phone will have the latest update, or how long it is going to take to fix a bug the phone might have at launch.

 

A perfect example of that is the HTC Thunderbolt. It took HTC 6 months to get Gingerbread on the Thunderbolt; Gingerbread came out 4 months before the Thunderbolt did. It also had terrible battery life, as well as random reboots and a mobile hotspot that was very inconsistent for months. It took them such a long time to fix the problem, in part because of their custom skin. Their custom skin creates a problem because the OS is Android, but HTC adds another layer on top of Android to give it more customization. For HTC to come out with an update, they have to take the android update and then make connections between the layer they put on top and Android(the base level). The reason that these phones have problems is because there are miscommunications or misconnections between the Android and the layer they put on top  of it.
For example, if HTC has a wifi toggle widget that doesn’t come with pure Android, they need to make a connection between how that toggle works and how it works in Android. These connections are known as drivers. If there is even the smallest error in the code that connects these two functions, it will not work. HTC has to make these connections codes for all of the extra functions they add, as well as anything they want to customize to look different. This is why it takes so long for their phones to receive updates. This is a perfect example of something that goes on across the board for Android handsets; it is something that everyone should understand or at least think about a little before being tied to your phone for 2 years.
Picture Sources:
http://androidcommunity.com/motorola-droid-razr-image-revealed-from-teaser-site-20111017/
http://www.gforgames.com/gadgets/motorola-droid-razr-release-date-verizon-14934/
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/verizon-removes-skype-video-from-htc-thunderbolt-20110218/