It’s been a long, tough, road, but customers of Sony Ericsson’s beleaguered X10 have some reason to celebrate this week as the Japanese version offered on NTT DoCoMo becomes the first to get an official multitouch software upgrade. Mind you, it’s not a full, perfect multitouch implementation: pinch-to-zoom is actually the only gesture supported, which means rotation (in Maps, for example) won’t work, and it’s also not guaranteed to work in all multitouch-capable third-party apps. Furthermore, Sony Ericsson isn’t yet talking about when the update will be available for other markets — and considering the phased Android 2.1 rollout, some markets could be in for a bit of a wait.
Look, if you buy a carrier-branded Android handset, you should know good and well that you may never see the first Android update. It ain’t easy to hear, but as mama always said, the truth ain’t always painless. That said, there’s still some research you should do before picking a phone and carrier, and ComputerWorld has seemingly done just that for you. The methodology is all explained down in the source link, but the long and short of it is this: in the last half of 2010, Verizon upgraded 33 percent of its sub-2.2 phones to Froyo, while Sprint updated just 28.6 percent of its stable and T-Mobile blessed only 12.5 percent of its phones with the new digs. AT&T bashers should take note, as Ma Bell didn’t update a single one of its nine Android phones during the June-December 2010 time period. Yeah, ouch. Over on the handset side, we’ve got HTC gifting half of its devices with Froyo, while Motorola comes in second with 15.4 percent and Samsung third with 11.1 percent. No matter how you slice it, it’s a depressing study to look at, and it probably makes your decision to skip over a Nexus One seem all the more idiotic in retrospect. But hey, at least there’s the Nexus S to console you… if you’re willing to sign up with T-Mob, that is.
Happy Thursday, Verizon customers! No better way to celebrate the beginning of the second half of the work week than with a couple firmware updates, we always say — and Big Red’s playing the part with new builds for the Fascinate and Droid Pro. The Fascinate update doesn’t seem to be Froyo as far as we can tell — disappointing, we know — but it’s still got a long list of improvements covering everything from Bluetooth and GPS to updated third-party apps in ROM. On the Droid Pro side, this seems to mirror the Droid 2 Global update that went out not long ago, promising improved voice quality and better global roaming performance. So go on, get your upgrade on — and let us know how it went.
Seems like T-Mobile’s fed up with claims that its network isn’t truly 4G — starting today, it’s doubling the bandwidth of HSPA+ to 42 megabits per second as promised. They’ve conducting a live test in Las Vegas on the CES 2011 stage, playing some online multiplayer Need for Speed, but it won’t be limited to the City of Sin for long — fully two-thirds of its 200+ million person coverage zone will find blazing transfer speeds by the end of the year as the improvements roll out. Next stop — 650Mbps.
The farce that has been Sony Ericsson’s bungled, delayed, and deservedly maligned Android upgrade story for the Xperia X10 family is coming to a fittingly silly end. Questioned by Android Community on the possibility of a Froyo (Android 2.2) upgrade for its initial set of Android handsets, the SE team has just come out and admitted that there’ll be no future OS upgrades, at least in terms of Android iterations. The X10, X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are not being abandoned, not at all, but the only software enhancements you can look forward to will come directly from Sony Ericsson. The company hardly sees that as a bad thing, however, judging by a recent tweet announcing its belief that an SE-customized Eclair tastes better than Google’s untouched Froyo. We’d protest, but what’s the use?
It’s no secret that Microsoft is anxious to get copy / paste functionality rolled out to Windows Phone 7 users on the double. In his CES keynote last night, Steve Ballmer himself said that it’d be coming soon — but a little hint on Microsoft’s site indicates that it might be coming as soon as this month: the URL Microsoft is using for the update’s details page includes “january-update.aspx” in it, which we’d say is pretty telling. Of course, launch dates inevitably slip, and perennial Microsoft guru Paul Thurrott thinks it’s tracking for early February before it’ll actually reach users’ devices… so we wouldn’t go canceling vacations you’ve got scheduled this month just so you can be around to score the update as soon as it’s available.
Word on the street from Microsoft savant Paul Thurrott is that Windows Phone 7′s first update might go gold as early as this week — in time for Ballmer’s CES keynote, in fact, which means he might give it a mention and / or spend a few minutes showing it off. It’s said to be codenamed “NoDo,” short for “No Donuts” — a pretty obscure (and odd) reference to the fact that Redmond doesn’t want to release incremental, minor updates like Google did with Android 1.6 Donut. We’re not sure why they’d bother taking a swipe at an Android build that happened… oh, four versions ago, but Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Anyhow, it’ll apparently add copy / paste, CDMA location support (which might be the only thing holding up Verizon and Sprint from launching at this point), support for additional Qualcomm chipsets, and miscellaneous bug fixes.
Moving on, Thurrott says that the rumored Mango update isn’t the next update after NoDo, but it’s real — and it’s big. It’ll add Internet Explorer 9 with HTML 5 and Silverlight support, but notably, its code line is being referred to internally as the “entertainment branch,” so there might be some other magic in store. Current version numbers for Mango are in the 7.2 range, but builds are in the 7500 range, suggesting Windows Phone 7.5 branding is a possibility. An exciting 2011 for Microsoft on the mobile side? Looks like.
Update: Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has chimed in on Twitter in direct response to Thurrott:
“BTW, a guy failed to bring donuts to a meeting after loosing [sic] a bet. The ‘nodo’ codename had nothing to do with Android.”
Makes a heck of a lot more sense — and it confirms the accuracy of the codename. Thanks, CrookedC!
A quick gander at Samsung’s Canadian support site for the Galaxy S line reveals that two Android 2.2 updates are currently available: one for the Vibrant — offered by Bell, Virgin Mobile, and SaskTel — and one for the Fascinate as sold be Telus. This all follows just a few days after Sammy had to pull the Vibrant’s Froyo update on word that it seemed be killing the internal microSD storage, so hopefully, this build will be just a little more drama-free. Oh, and Samsung had originally said that Telus Fascinate owners would be waiting until next year to upgrade their units, so it’s pretty neat that they were able to rein that in a bit and get it pushed at the tail end of ’10. So have fun, Canadians — you’ve beaten your friends with T-Mobile Vibrants and Verizon Fascinates to the punch on this one, and we encourage you to lord it over them at every opportunity.
Happy holidays, Wildfire owners — here’s your gift! Seems HTC has started pushing over-the-air Android 2.2 updates to its low-end Wildfire on networks around the globe in the past few days, giving you a final build number of 2.22.405.1 by the time everything is said and done. All the usual Froyo features apply, presumably — but as far as we know, the software won’t magically upgrade your display from QVGA to HVGA. Now, wouldn’t that be a Christmas miracle?
Ah, the brutally fast, unrelenting pace of Android: sure is tough for manufacturers to keep their products — some of which are just weeks old — looking fresh when they’re one or two major OS versions behind, isn’t it? LG promised all the way back in August that owners of its QWERTY Ally for Verizon would be eventually getting Froyo, and now they’ve offered up a window: next February. That’s kind of sucky considering that means it will have been a solid half year since they originally announced the update, but short of buying a Nexus or falling in with the xda-developers crowd, there still doesn’t seem to be a great way to guarantee that you’re going to stay on the bleeding edge of the Android code trunk.
It’s been a long, tough, road, but customers of Sony Ericsson’s beleaguered X10 have some reason to celebrate this week as the Japanese version offered on NTT DoCoMo becomes the first to get an official multitouch software upgrade. Mind you, it’s not a full, perfect multitouch implementation: pinch-to-zoom is actually the only gesture supported, which means rotation (in Maps, for example) won’t work, and it’s also not guaranteed to work in all multitouch-capable third-party apps. Furthermore, Sony Ericsson isn’t yet talking about when the update will be available for other markets — and considering the phased Android 2.1 rollout, some markets could be in for a bit of a wait.
