There's no incentive for Google to provide backward compatibility for Android, hence they don't.
Then what's the incentive for Apple to do just that? IOS5 runs on the iPhone 3GS, which is older than the Nexus One.
Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#52Great. I guess I can stop hitting the "Update" thing every day in the hope that 4.0 will appear. I can't help but note that the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch purchased the same month are already running iOS 5.0 and I haven't noticed any speed issues.
My 3GS is almost unusably slow on iOS5.
I've only upgraded one of the 3GS's to iOS 5, and my experiences pretty much match this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4956/apple-ios-5-review/15
Basically, as fast or faster than 4.3. But mine is a development-only device with no music or other content, so maybe that's the difference.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#53I imagine that this is not due to the n1 being "underpowered" per se, as the nexus s has roughly the same specs as the n1, but more internal storage. The problem is due to the fact that the n1 can't accommodate the ics image, which google is claiming is about twice as large in size. /speculation
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#54It's sad when a phone that's only 1.5 years old is "too old". I really enjoyed my N1 with Cyanogenmod, but switched back to iPhone when news of T-Mobile's acquisition by AT&T started coming out.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started with an N1 and later got an iPad 2. I found I had to turn off all push notifications and was surprised that apple would put out something that had such inferior usability when the notification dropdown thing that Android has is so clearly better. Maybe they didn't want to copy the people they despised? Or maybe they just couldn't find the engineering time until 5.0? I dunno. It was unbearable. I had to turn…
I was doing the same thing. I had a Nexus One and an iPad 2. My Nexus One crashed 12 times while I happily used my iPad 2 without problems.
Dunno why you got downmodded... Anyway, yeah the Nexus One is definitely not bug free. But it's been the case with things on the iPad too, but in general it's pretty stable. I don't use it as much throughout the day as the N1 though, so, I don't really have a great stability sense for it. Also, this kind of goes to the apples-to-oranges value of my experience, since I'm using the two things fairly differently.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#56I've always wondered about this, especially in embedded devices. Amongst the many mistakes Microsoft made with Vista, first and foremost was allowing the bloat to get so bad that it wouldn't run at all on machines that ran XP quite happily. Later Windows 7 could actually run on those old XP machines with many, if not most, of the features that Vista bragged about. So here we have Google, arguably a company which can…
taking the time to run great on hardware of that capability pays huge dividends in the phone world. It really won't though, that's the problem. The Nexus One is nearly two years old. It's somewhat of an anomaly because it'll have a higher than average number of off-contract purchases, but in general once a person's contact has run for two years they get a new phone. Two year old phones just aren't that important. Spe…
in general once a person's contact has run for two years they get a new phone
That kind of market calculus made sense before the recession. Now the value proposition has changed, and while people may still buy newer hardware (such as tablets) they expect better value from their tech purchasing because increasing wealth is no longer a given. Also, people are more suspicious of corporations in general, especially ones that are sitting on a large cash pile. Public sentiment is fickle and can quickly bite a company in the ass - look at how far the stars of Groupon and Netflix have fallen in just two quarters.
The idea that everyone should replace their smartphone every two years says either that your firm is not interested in supplying the less well-off, or else that it doesn't much care whether its products end up in landfill or not. Sure, Apple locks down its hardware platform so tightly that maintaining backwards compatibility is far easier than it is for Google, but note how Apple products maintain a high resale value and that allows them to sell new ones at a premium price point without hurting demand. Apple may be hard to deal with for developers, but Apple consumers feel the firm treats them like Kings or Queens. Google overlooks this market positioning strategy at its peril; loyalty is a two-way street, and the firm should know this very well given its historical disruption of the Yahoo/Altavista/Lycos triumvirate that dominated search back in ~1998.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#57I've got both the Nexus One and an iPhone 4 and I can never understand why anyone would choose the Nexus One over an iPhone, it's such an inferior product both hardware and software wise. The comparatively poor quality as put me off anything but iPhones.
The Nexus One is really more comparable to the 3Gs and I think it stands up well against it. I bought mine since I wanted an unlocked phone that didn't require a custom hack to accomplish. I've been considering going back to an iPhone 4s if Apple decides to sell it unlocked from their store.
I believe they will come November, according to their store page.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine too. I'm upgrading to the 4S because of this. Can't wait for the 5. I also have a Nexus One for development. I find it hard to believe it was $600 in Jan 2010 and now it's obsolete.
I wouldn't consider the Nexus One obsolete. The whole point of the N1 is that it has an unlocked bootloader, so you don't need Google's blessing to run custom roms or newer versions on your hardware. There are already ongoing efforts to port the 4.0 SDK images to run on the Nexus One and the Nexus S, and I guarantee there will be even better options once the source code is released. Use the freedom you paid $600 for…
Exactly. The G1 was technically EOL'd at Android 1.6, but a coworker been running 2.2 on his for well over a year now using a custom ROM.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#59I imagine that this is not due to the n1 being "underpowered" per se, as the nexus s has roughly the same specs as the n1, but more internal storage. The problem is due to the fact that the n1 can't accommodate the ics image, which google is claiming is about twice as large in size. /speculation
I think you're right. running out of onboard space is an issue if I install too many apps on the N1.
Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0
#60I've always wondered about this, especially in embedded devices. Amongst the many mistakes Microsoft made with Vista, first and foremost was allowing the bloat to get so bad that it wouldn't run at all on machines that ran XP quite happily. Later Windows 7 could actually run on those old XP machines with many, if not most, of the features that Vista bragged about. So here we have Google, arguably a company which can…
This isn't a hardware capacity issue. The Snapdragon has a 1 GHz CPU very similar to the Cortex A8, an Adreno 200 GPU broadly comparable to an SGX 535, and the same 512MB of DRAM that all the other phones of its generation have.
Its UMTS radio wouldn't make the cut on today's store shelves, and its camera sucks. But fundamentally this is about planned obsolescence. Google doesn't want to have to pay to maintain the driver stack and QA infrastructure for an old phone.