10 ms·

Why U.S. Galaxy S Phones run Android 2.1

284 points by spidaman 16y ago

spidaman 16y ago
Some galaxy S handsets have Froyo (see http://pages.samsung.com/ca/froyo/English/?pid=ca_home_subbanner2_froyo_011111 http://pages.samsung.com/ca/froyo/English/?pid=ca_home_subba...) others don't, like my Epic 4g. Is it really politics or QA challenges; no official word has been forthcoming.
- yock 16y ago
  Your link is to the Canadian site for phones configured for Canadian carriers. Not to be pedantic, but the content of the link is specific to the business practices of US carriers.
  - oiuhjyftgrdgh 16y ago
    You mean we are being screwed over LESS than the US for a cellphone? Oh damn - here comes the apocalypse, lions lying down with lambs, rivers of blood, oceans of fire - Canadians getting good deals on a cellphone.
  - nollidge 16y ago
    U.S. Cellular at least just announced it will be rolling out Froyo on a bunch of their phones: http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4707-android-froyo-htc-desire-samsung-mesmerize-acclaim http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4707-android-froyo-htc-de...
yock 16y ago
This might be plausible, but it can't possibly be confirmed which makes it no better than speculation. I'm as frustrated as the next guy that my Captivate is still running Eclair, but stuff like this doesn't really get us any closer to a solution. When both carrier and manufacturer neglect to offer explanation or consideration for their collective failure to deliver, they must collectively be held responsible. This means switching carriers when possible and buying from different handset manufacturers. This approach has teeth, but only in large numbers. That's why it's so important to set this silliness aside and focus on real and tangible things the average consumer can do. Focusing on fantastical stories of employees clandestinely posting anonomyous accounts of shady contract terms makes for great drama, but still leaves us without resolution. And quite honestly if it took this story to urge you to action then you weren't all that disappointed in AT&T and Samsung's failure in the first place.
- oasisbob 16y ago
  Yes, everyone should be aware that not everything they read on the internet is true. As a consumer, this is very useful even without confirmation. If it's true: it explains why some carrier-shipped phones aren't updated. If it's entirely made-up and speculative ... it still might suggest a business reason why carrier-shipped phones aren't updated. Reminds me of this quote by Thomas Kean: I remember going over a whole report the FBI gave me, 300 pages, "Classified" stamps all over it. I read the whole thing, 300 pages, with an FBI guy looking over my shoulder. After I was finished I turned to him, [and] I said: "I've read all this in the press! Why is it classified?" And he looked at me and said, "But you didn't know it was true." That was his answer.
- Zaak 16y ago
  Summaries of Android upgrades by manufacturer and carrier: http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades http://blogs.computerworld.com/17650/android_upgrades_carriers http://blogs.computerworld.com/17650/android_upgrades_carrie... tl;dr, Your best bet for upgrades is a high-end HTC phone on Verizon. If you go with Samsung or AT&T, you're out of luck.
  - spidaman 16y ago
    Regarding "It seems safe to say, then -- no big surprise -- that aside from considering a phone's manufacturer, going with a higher profile, top-of-the-line device will improve your odds of receiving regular OS upgrades..." The Epic 4g has been Sprint's flagship phone, still running Eclair. I'm regretting not going with the Evo at times.
    - evilduck 16y ago
      I'm on Sprint with a Samsung Moment, forever stuck on 2.1. The Moment was officially dropped by Samsung 9 months from release with the only recent update being a fix* to the radio driver because the CDMA radio would die so badly it couldn't call out (including being unable to call 911...an FCC violation) and it required a reboot to fix. Sprint has been known to replace it for free with an HTC Hero if you throw enough tantrums and demand enough replacements of the same model, but really, Samsung is to blame here. I will never own another Samsung phone and have prevented others from buying them as well. I've personally given up hopes of the problem ever being rectified, but I'm switching my family to Verizon/iPhones at the end of my contract. * It didn't really fix anything. The radio still dies randomly, just slightly less often.
ericz 16y ago
This is rather heinous. A fee is definitely understandable but a per-device fee is really outrageous. I don't know how carriers were willing to agree in the first place. If they collectively bargained against this before even carrying the phone they probably would've had much more luck. Although I'm sure Samsung has every right to charge however much they want, perhaps Google could step in and remind them that if they Samsung wants to be greedy they can always use Bada
marshray 16y ago
Gee, I'd kind of liked Samsung because they seemed to focus on delivering good technology at a good price. I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past (perhaps relative to the Japanese tech industry). This makes it seem like they're hiring Marketers and MBAs who think the best plan is to try to squeeze as much as they can out of their contract customers (the cell carriers) rather than put as much Samsung awesomeness as possible into the hands of actual happy users. Short-term thinking never gets old. Maybe it's time to look at HTC.
- ScottBurson 16y ago
  Agreed. I like the Epic's form factor and slide-out keyboard (in fact I'm typing this on a Nokia N810, which is almost exactly the same size) and was excited when I saw it announced. I would probably have bought one by now if it had Froyo. But watching Samsung's behavior around this upgrade has turned me off completely. Maybe with Swype on an Evo I wouldn't miss the physical keyboard.
- mikeryan 16y ago
  I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past They don't. Samsung is an 800lb Gorilla in the CE space. They are the biggest seller of HDTV's in the US (though Vizio is closing fast) and the second largest manufacturer of cell phones worldwide. Samsung is also starting to throw its weight around a lot.
  - marshray 16y ago
    Well if they're not careful they could end up being Sony minus the videogame and music business units.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  In fairness to Samsung they do incur non-trivial cost doing this. Imagine this situation Verizon says, "Our Samsung Galaxy S phone must get 2.2" while Sprint says, "No need". Should Sprint have to pay for what Verizon is getting? The issue is that you're going to pay, whether its Samsung or HTC. Some companies will build the price into the phone, others will price it in some other way (or some companies could eat the cost -- but that's probably not sustainable). Charging directly to the end user seems like the best way to do it. If I want 2.2, then I should pay for it, and if I'm happy with 2.1 why should I pay for other people to get 2.2? But short of that, charging the carriers makes sense.
ergo98 16y ago
The conflicting interests issue is really a problem in the Android space. As has been shown time and time again, vendors really don't want the burden of keeping your handset up to date forever because there is nothing in it for them, aside from perhaps avoiding too much negative press. Naturally people are going to compare it to iOS, where updates are free and rapidly disseminated. The difference there is that there definitely is something in it for Apple -- they're getting a cut of every app you buy, every song you download, etc. They're a middleman, so it's just a cost of doing business. I wish we could get to a point where Android updates cost money. I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date.
- mindslight 16y ago
  > I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date. That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. The path forward is for Android to actually become consumer open source (GPL3). Let device manufacturers concentrate on shipping hardware and adding any new device drivers to a public repository. Updates can then be directly applied by eager users, or eventually pushed out by carriers with minimal integration effort. Proprietary "value adds" like SenseUI can still be done through the package system.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. How so? It aligns interests in virtually every way.
    - mindslight 16y ago
      You're assuming that there's a decent amount of people who both have a pressing need for an OS upgrade and wouldn't revolt at the manufacturer charging them to access what is primarily a free update from AOSP. Furthermore, once one person pays $30 for the upgrade, that image can be freely passed around the tinkering communities, so the manufacturer has an incentive for even stronger consumer-hostile DRM. (Yes, integration takes work, but that's exactly why manufacturers need to push their modified code upstream so it can be tested/changed along with the rest of AOSP. A carrier-blessed release should take QA and some minor bugfixes instead of a horrifically large merge-and-debug.)
periferral 16y ago
this seems to make very little sense. most of the custom ROMs out there are based on Samsung's leaked 2.2 ROMs. If Samsung really didn't want to send out official updates for 2.2 they could stop the leaks and would kill XDA updates. Also judging by the updates trickling in, there is still a lot of work being put in by Samsung to makes these ROMs stable. Almost every leaked ROM has issues. lag fixes and gps fixes on XDA seem to be the norm to work around them
mtarnovan 16y ago
This is a very unhealthy trend for Android. Development will be much more costly and difficult if the user base is split across many different API levels. This article contains some insight (if you can get past the bs title...): http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/
fakespastic 16y ago
I own an Evo 4G (Android 2.2) and my wife owns an Epic 4G (2.1). I have noticed no difference in their usability at all, aside from a few hardware-specific quirks. I'm somewhat indifferent to the Android dot-releases, and am not seeing much in Gingerbread that I care too much about, either, aside from the improved task management.
rufugee 16y ago
Just bought a Vibrant last week. After all the reported issues...I'm on the fence on whether to return it. It's a beautiful phone and seems faster than my Droid 2...even running Eclair. Still, the GPS is weak to non-existent at times, and although I can upgrade the phone myself I'd rather have an official version. Ugh.
rbanffy 16y ago
Sadly, this doesn't explain why my Cliq XT (called Quench down here) will be forever stuck with 1.5. At least until I decide to crack it and do the upgrade myself. As soon as I find a 1.6+ or 2.x image that pleases me.
teye 16y ago
I've been planning to give up my iPhone for a 4G VZW Android, but it's easy to take a direct update channel for granted. So, iOS 4 has 90 percent share amongst iOS device owners. What about Android 2.3? 0.4 percent, as of a couple weeks ago. Yes, that’s zero point four percent. But for the sake of this being slightly more fair, let’s compare iOS 4 to Android 2.2 — an OS which came out well before iOS 4. The adoption rate there? 51.8 percent. That’s still pretty pathetic. http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/
icarus_drowning 16y ago
As an Android user (and promoter to my friends/family), I'm starting to get worried about Google's approach to the product. Not because of "fragmentation" (which to me is an argument that essentially says "Android isn't going to ever be successful because its too successful now"), but because of the lack of attention it seems to be getting from Google. It isn't just the OS itself-- several of Google's own apps are getting buggier and buggier. Voice worked fine when I first got my Droid a year or so ago, but has had a lot of bugs-- including dialing random numbers instead of the one I wanted. (Just yesterday, I tried to send a text message to XXX-XXXX and it truncated the last digit of the first group and complained that it couldn't send a text to XX-XXXX. Nothing I did could stop it from doing this except using the web-based version). Google Listen has stopped refreshing for huge numbers of people, and my wife's new Galaxy S won't even accept subscriptions. Not a word from Google on either issue, even though both show up in searches for the problem. I had to install Launcher Pro to get any kind of performance out of my Droid, and even then it occasionally locks up on the home screen. Sometimes calls come in and the touch interface freezes, which means that I can't answer the phone. The Droid also will occasionally decide that there is no data connection when it has full 3G service according to the indicators. I don't use it, but the stock SMS app has apparently has its own problems too-- at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix, but as a whole, Android has gone from less technologically interesting (no wi-fi hotspots, etc) and stable to exciting and really buggy. Combine that with this kind of politicking, and I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about Android every day.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  > "at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix" That's of little comfort. The bug report was dismissed and deprioritized for a long time before pressure from the public/internet forced Google to prioritize it and ship a fix. If Google can't even prioritize and fix critical bugs like this without the blogosphere getting all up in their business... what hope does Android have?
- fleitz 16y ago
  There's just one hole in your plan. The more bugs you have on your phone the more searches it generates :)
ralphc 16y ago
This doesn't bode well for my Galaxy Tab running Froyo, hoping for Gingerbread and Honeycomb one day.
jorgem 16y ago
Impromptu poll: Who really thinks a diatribe like this from TechCrunch can make Google or their carriers do anything different?
old-gregg 16y ago
Somewhat related: how/when do we get Gingerbread on Nexus One?
Charuru 16y ago
Great info, but in the back of my mind I'm thinking that this sort of leak really puts the pressure on Samsung and is highly advantageous to the carriers.
tworats 16y ago
If this turns out to be true Samsung just lost a customer for life. This is just plain stupid, short sighted thinking.
pieter 16y ago
It's interesting how this works in the Dutch market: the Galaxy S phones aren't carrier-branded here (they're all called Galaxy S). On phone sites, you can select the phone first, and then choose for a contract from any of the 3 main carriers. It also means that when Samsung ships an update, you can use that update for your phone, whichever carrier you're on. Samsung released Froyo in November, and you can install it on any Galaxy S phone bought here. The update isn't over the air though; you have to connect your phone to your pc, and which auto-updates it. In any case, the carriers have nothing to do with this update so any delays are purely Samsung's fault.

284 points by spidaman 16y ago

Some galaxy S handsets have Froyo (see http://pages.samsung.com/ca/froyo/English/?pid=ca_home_subbanner2_froyo_011111 http://pages.samsung.com/ca/froyo/English/?pid=ca_home_subba...) others don't, like my Epic 4g. Is it really politics or QA challenges; no official word has been forthcoming.

yock 16y ago
Your link is to the Canadian site for phones configured for Canadian carriers. Not to be pedantic, but the content of the link is specific to the business practices of US carriers.
- oiuhjyftgrdgh 16y ago
  You mean we are being screwed over LESS than the US for a cellphone? Oh damn - here comes the apocalypse, lions lying down with lambs, rivers of blood, oceans of fire - Canadians getting good deals on a cellphone.
- nollidge 16y ago
  U.S. Cellular at least just announced it will be rolling out Froyo on a bunch of their phones: http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4707-android-froyo-htc-desire-samsung-mesmerize-acclaim http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4707-android-froyo-htc-de...

yock 16y ago

This might be plausible, but it can't possibly be confirmed which makes it no better than speculation. I'm as frustrated as the next guy that my Captivate is still running Eclair, but stuff like this doesn't really get us any closer to a solution. When both carrier and manufacturer neglect to offer explanation or consideration for their collective failure to deliver, they must collectively be held responsible. This means switching carriers when possible and buying from different handset manufacturers. This approach has teeth, but only in large numbers. That's why it's so important to set this silliness aside and focus on real and tangible things the average consumer can do. Focusing on fantastical stories of employees clandestinely posting anonomyous accounts of shady contract terms makes for great drama, but still leaves us without resolution. And quite honestly if it took this story to urge you to action then you weren't all that disappointed in AT&T and Samsung's failure in the first place.

oasisbob 16y ago
Yes, everyone should be aware that not everything they read on the internet is true. As a consumer, this is very useful even without confirmation. If it's true: it explains why some carrier-shipped phones aren't updated. If it's entirely made-up and speculative ... it still might suggest a business reason why carrier-shipped phones aren't updated. Reminds me of this quote by Thomas Kean: I remember going over a whole report the FBI gave me, 300 pages, "Classified" stamps all over it. I read the whole thing, 300 pages, with an FBI guy looking over my shoulder. After I was finished I turned to him, [and] I said: "I've read all this in the press! Why is it classified?" And he looked at me and said, "But you didn't know it was true." That was his answer.
Zaak 16y ago
Summaries of Android upgrades by manufacturer and carrier: http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades http://blogs.computerworld.com/17650/android_upgrades_carriers http://blogs.computerworld.com/17650/android_upgrades_carrie... tl;dr, Your best bet for upgrades is a high-end HTC phone on Verizon. If you go with Samsung or AT&T, you're out of luck.
- spidaman 16y ago
  Regarding "It seems safe to say, then -- no big surprise -- that aside from considering a phone's manufacturer, going with a higher profile, top-of-the-line device will improve your odds of receiving regular OS upgrades..." The Epic 4g has been Sprint's flagship phone, still running Eclair. I'm regretting not going with the Evo at times.
  - evilduck 16y ago
    I'm on Sprint with a Samsung Moment, forever stuck on 2.1. The Moment was officially dropped by Samsung 9 months from release with the only recent update being a fix* to the radio driver because the CDMA radio would die so badly it couldn't call out (including being unable to call 911...an FCC violation) and it required a reboot to fix. Sprint has been known to replace it for free with an HTC Hero if you throw enough tantrums and demand enough replacements of the same model, but really, Samsung is to blame here. I will never own another Samsung phone and have prevented others from buying them as well. I've personally given up hopes of the problem ever being rectified, but I'm switching my family to Verizon/iPhones at the end of my contract. * It didn't really fix anything. The radio still dies randomly, just slightly less often.

ericz 16y ago

This is rather heinous. A fee is definitely understandable but a per-device fee is really outrageous. I don't know how carriers were willing to agree in the first place. If they collectively bargained against this before even carrying the phone they probably would've had much more luck. Although I'm sure Samsung has every right to charge however much they want, perhaps Google could step in and remind them that if they Samsung wants to be greedy they can always use Bada

marshray 16y ago

Gee, I'd kind of liked Samsung because they seemed to focus on delivering good technology at a good price. I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past (perhaps relative to the Japanese tech industry). This makes it seem like they're hiring Marketers and MBAs who think the best plan is to try to squeeze as much as they can out of their contract customers (the cell carriers) rather than put as much Samsung awesomeness as possible into the hands of actual happy users. Short-term thinking never gets old. Maybe it's time to look at HTC.

ScottBurson 16y ago
Agreed. I like the Epic's form factor and slide-out keyboard (in fact I'm typing this on a Nokia N810, which is almost exactly the same size) and was excited when I saw it announced. I would probably have bought one by now if it had Froyo. But watching Samsung's behavior around this upgrade has turned me off completely. Maybe with Swype on an Evo I wouldn't miss the physical keyboard.
mikeryan 16y ago
I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past They don't. Samsung is an 800lb Gorilla in the CE space. They are the biggest seller of HDTV's in the US (though Vizio is closing fast) and the second largest manufacturer of cell phones worldwide. Samsung is also starting to throw its weight around a lot.
- marshray 16y ago
  Well if they're not careful they could end up being Sony minus the videogame and music business units.
kenjackson 16y ago
In fairness to Samsung they do incur non-trivial cost doing this. Imagine this situation Verizon says, "Our Samsung Galaxy S phone must get 2.2" while Sprint says, "No need". Should Sprint have to pay for what Verizon is getting? The issue is that you're going to pay, whether its Samsung or HTC. Some companies will build the price into the phone, others will price it in some other way (or some companies could eat the cost -- but that's probably not sustainable). Charging directly to the end user seems like the best way to do it. If I want 2.2, then I should pay for it, and if I'm happy with 2.1 why should I pay for other people to get 2.2? But short of that, charging the carriers makes sense.

ergo98 16y ago

The conflicting interests issue is really a problem in the Android space. As has been shown time and time again, vendors really don't want the burden of keeping your handset up to date forever because there is nothing in it for them, aside from perhaps avoiding too much negative press. Naturally people are going to compare it to iOS, where updates are free and rapidly disseminated. The difference there is that there definitely is something in it for Apple -- they're getting a cut of every app you buy, every song you download, etc. They're a middleman, so it's just a cost of doing business. I wish we could get to a point where Android updates cost money. I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date.

mindslight 16y ago
> I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date. That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. The path forward is for Android to actually become consumer open source (GPL3). Let device manufacturers concentrate on shipping hardware and adding any new device drivers to a public repository. Updates can then be directly applied by eager users, or eventually pushed out by carriers with minimal integration effort. Proprietary "value adds" like SenseUI can still be done through the package system.
- ergo98 16y ago
  That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. How so? It aligns interests in virtually every way.
  - mindslight 16y ago
    You're assuming that there's a decent amount of people who both have a pressing need for an OS upgrade and wouldn't revolt at the manufacturer charging them to access what is primarily a free update from AOSP. Furthermore, once one person pays $30 for the upgrade, that image can be freely passed around the tinkering communities, so the manufacturer has an incentive for even stronger consumer-hostile DRM. (Yes, integration takes work, but that's exactly why manufacturers need to push their modified code upstream so it can be tested/changed along with the rest of AOSP. A carrier-blessed release should take QA and some minor bugfixes instead of a horrifically large merge-and-debug.)

periferral 16y ago

this seems to make very little sense. most of the custom ROMs out there are based on Samsung's leaked 2.2 ROMs. If Samsung really didn't want to send out official updates for 2.2 they could stop the leaks and would kill XDA updates. Also judging by the updates trickling in, there is still a lot of work being put in by Samsung to makes these ROMs stable. Almost every leaked ROM has issues. lag fixes and gps fixes on XDA seem to be the norm to work around them

mtarnovan 16y ago

This is a very unhealthy trend for Android. Development will be much more costly and difficult if the user base is split across many different API levels. This article contains some insight (if you can get past the bs title...): http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/

fakespastic 16y ago

I own an Evo 4G (Android 2.2) and my wife owns an Epic 4G (2.1). I have noticed no difference in their usability at all, aside from a few hardware-specific quirks. I'm somewhat indifferent to the Android dot-releases, and am not seeing much in Gingerbread that I care too much about, either, aside from the improved task management.

rufugee 16y ago

Just bought a Vibrant last week. After all the reported issues...I'm on the fence on whether to return it. It's a beautiful phone and seems faster than my Droid 2...even running Eclair. Still, the GPS is weak to non-existent at times, and although I can upgrade the phone myself I'd rather have an official version. Ugh.

rbanffy 16y ago

Sadly, this doesn't explain why my Cliq XT (called Quench down here) will be forever stuck with 1.5. At least until I decide to crack it and do the upgrade myself. As soon as I find a 1.6+ or 2.x image that pleases me.

teye 16y ago

I've been planning to give up my iPhone for a 4G VZW Android, but it's easy to take a direct update channel for granted. So, iOS 4 has 90 percent share amongst iOS device owners. What about Android 2.3? 0.4 percent, as of a couple weeks ago. Yes, that’s zero point four percent. But for the sake of this being slightly more fair, let’s compare iOS 4 to Android 2.2 — an OS which came out well before iOS 4. The adoption rate there? 51.8 percent. That’s still pretty pathetic. http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/

icarus_drowning 16y ago

As an Android user (and promoter to my friends/family), I'm starting to get worried about Google's approach to the product. Not because of "fragmentation" (which to me is an argument that essentially says "Android isn't going to ever be successful because its too successful now"), but because of the lack of attention it seems to be getting from Google. It isn't just the OS itself-- several of Google's own apps are getting buggier and buggier. Voice worked fine when I first got my Droid a year or so ago, but has had a lot of bugs-- including dialing random numbers instead of the one I wanted. (Just yesterday, I tried to send a text message to XXX-XXXX and it truncated the last digit of the first group and complained that it couldn't send a text to XX-XXXX. Nothing I did could stop it from doing this except using the web-based version). Google Listen has stopped refreshing for huge numbers of people, and my wife's new Galaxy S won't even accept subscriptions. Not a word from Google on either issue, even though both show up in searches for the problem. I had to install Launcher Pro to get any kind of performance out of my Droid, and even then it occasionally locks up on the home screen. Sometimes calls come in and the touch interface freezes, which means that I can't answer the phone. The Droid also will occasionally decide that there is no data connection when it has full 3G service according to the indicators. I don't use it, but the stock SMS app has apparently has its own problems too-- at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix, but as a whole, Android has gone from less technologically interesting (no wi-fi hotspots, etc) and stable to exciting and really buggy. Combine that with this kind of politicking, and I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about Android every day.

potatolicious 16y ago
> "at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix" That's of little comfort. The bug report was dismissed and deprioritized for a long time before pressure from the public/internet forced Google to prioritize it and ship a fix. If Google can't even prioritize and fix critical bugs like this without the blogosphere getting all up in their business... what hope does Android have?
fleitz 16y ago
There's just one hole in your plan. The more bugs you have on your phone the more searches it generates :)

ralphc 16y ago

This doesn't bode well for my Galaxy Tab running Froyo, hoping for Gingerbread and Honeycomb one day.

jorgem 16y ago

Impromptu poll: Who really thinks a diatribe like this from TechCrunch can make Google or their carriers do anything different?

old-gregg 16y ago

Somewhat related: how/when do we get Gingerbread on Nexus One?

Charuru 16y ago

Great info, but in the back of my mind I'm thinking that this sort of leak really puts the pressure on Samsung and is highly advantageous to the carriers.

tworats 16y ago

If this turns out to be true Samsung just lost a customer for life. This is just plain stupid, short sighted thinking.

pieter 16y ago

It's interesting how this works in the Dutch market: the Galaxy S phones aren't carrier-branded here (they're all called Galaxy S). On phone sites, you can select the phone first, and then choose for a contract from any of the 3 main carriers. It also means that when Samsung ships an update, you can use that update for your phone, whichever carrier you're on. Samsung released Froyo in November, and you can install it on any Galaxy S phone bought here. The update isn't over the air though; you have to connect your phone to your pc, and which auto-updates it. In any case, the carriers have nothing to do with this update so any delays are purely Samsung's fault.