Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#91

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:03 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #76

anigbrowl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. I'm not so sure about that. You can (probably- I'll be honest, I haven't checked for sure) get a more powerful Android handset than a Nexus One for free if…

There's very little to lose there- except having to take on a two year plan.

Creditworthiness is a major barrier for many people. Many more resent being tied to a single vendor. Hence the increasing market share of non-contract vendors, although they've been taking a beating too because cell service demand at the bottom end is highly elastic compared to food and housing.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#92

Post by spiralpolitik » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:05 PM UTC

So by the end of the year Android developers will have 5 different versions (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0 and 4.0) of Android in the wild and over 40% of which are running a version that's almost 18 months old (2.2) with no upgrade path.

And they say fragmentation isn't an issue...

It's Nokia and Symbian all over again.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#93

Post by angryasian » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:05 PM UTC

For a site called hackernews, it surprises me that people actually care about this. There will be so many available roms for ICS with source code release, and any phone that is at least running CM7 should have no worries. Its almost impossible to brick a phone during the root process and for a 2 year old phone to not attempt to root at this point, would not be using your hardware to its full benefit.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#94

Post by Tichy » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:10 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

I'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…

Well Apple, who as we know do everything right, also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#95

Post by 51Cards » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:23 PM UTC

The sunset photo as the wallpaper on the phone in the article is appropriate. Still love my Nexus One.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#96

Post by sliverstorm » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

bonzoesc wrote: post #81

ajross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> This isn't a hardware capacity issue. The Nexus One has 512MB of internal storage. The Nexus Galaxy has 32GB of internal storage. If ICS weighs in at much more than 400MB and has the stellar (read as: "perfunctory") MicroSD support we've come to expect from Android, it'd be about as enjoyable as a fart in a spacesuit on a Nexus One.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little blown away that ICS could come in close to 512MB. That sounds like bloat to me.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#97

Post by dextorious » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:38 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #94

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

I'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…

Well Apple, who as we know do everything right, also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

> Well Apple, who as we know do everything right

Really? Says who? The imaginary Apple-fanboy strawman?

> also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

What's "right" in this context? It's an engineering tradeoff. Considerations:

1) the cost of adding support for newer features for soon to be obsolete hardware 2) the benefits of using the added capabilities of newer hardware with no backward-compatibility restrictions (new sensors, etc). 3) the engineering effort required to make something performant in older hardware with less memory / cpu power.

From a customer standpoint, it's only wrong if the above don't hold, and the sole company's incentive is to artificially obsolete perfectly fine older devices.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#98

Post by lurker17 » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:40 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #76

anigbrowl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. I'm not so sure about that. You can (probably- I'll be honest, I haven't checked for sure) get a more powerful Android handset than a Nexus One for free if…

A 2-year contract costs $20/month more than a comparable month-to-month plan. (T-mobile's Even More /Plus plans make this explicit.) That's where the phone subsidy comes from.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#99

Post by Tichy » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:47 PM UTC

dextorious wrote: post #97

Tichy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Apple, who as we know do everything right, also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

> Well Apple, who as we know do everything right Really? Says who? The imaginary Apple-fanboy strawman? > also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right? What's "right" in this context? It's an engineering tradeoff. Considerations: 1) the cost of adding support for newer features for soon to be obsolete hardware 2) the benefits of using the added capabilities of newer hardware with no…

I don't think Google has any incentive to obsolete older devices.

Re: Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

#100

Post by archangel_one » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 9:55 PM UTC

beej71 wrote: post #15

chugger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS 5 runs smoothly on a 3GS, a phone older than the Nexus One.

But the last official update for the 3G turned it into a dog. I don't think any company is blameless, here, but I'm far more disappointed to see Google doing it. Linux still runs on a 386, last time I checked.

I'm not convinced that you could run a 3.0 kernel image on a 386 without running out of RAM pretty soon, even if you cut it down to something pretty minimal. I haven't found any sources where anyone's actually installed modern Linux on one - they all seem to have used ancient distros because support actually vanished some time back (see eg. here: http://hackaday.com/2011/08/12/installing-linux-on-a-386-lap...).