Probably the biggest difference is the software library for Android was fairly small 1.x to 1.5 to 1.6 and backwards compatibility wasn't really a problem. Toda

Probably the biggest difference is the software library for Android was fairly small 1.x to 1.5 to 1.6 and backwards compatibility wasn't really a problem. Today there are quite a few 2.0+ only apps out there including many of Google's own first party applications. There's a larger group of apps that kinda work on 1.x but don't seem to be extensively tested on 1.x so crashing/bugs start to become a problem. So if you go buy a new Android phone running 1.5 or 1.6 you will almost certainly run into problems with third party applications.