When
the Samsung Galaxy
was
announced earlier this year, it was quite a state-of-the-art
Android smartphone,
at time of the launch it ran the brand new
Android 1.5/Cupcake
OS and featured a unique AMOLED touchscreen and a 5 megapixel camera with flash
(both first for Android). However, as time went bye, Google released
Android 1.6/Donut
and Android 2.0/Eclair
and except
minor bugfix releases, Samsung
hasn't made any progress to either release the much overdue Android 1.6
update or the even worthier Android 2.0 upgrade.
Now some folks started a petition which should help to move Samsung forward
to release - at this point of the year - an Android 2.0 upgrade for the Samsung
Galaxy:
Many people bought the Samsung Galaxy since it was one of the first
Android devices with nice hardware features.
It is available since July 2009, and is of excellent quality.
Up to today there is no official statement from Samsung about future
firmware releases.
Many people wait for a new firmware for their device based on Android 2.0
The idea behind Android devices which many other manufacturers follow is to
keep the users up-to-date with a recent Android release.
E.g. HTC has done so with their models Dream, Magic and Hero
We, the Samsung Galaxy user-community, hope that Samsung will provide an
upgrade to a recent Android release (2.0 or the soon to be released 2.1) in
a near future.
The target is to get 100,000 supporters and at the moment, the petition has
1,236 supporters only. So doesn't matter if you have a Samsung Galaxy or not,
you might want to sign the petition too.
Also Samsung should better keep a closer eye on this topic since it could
cost the manufacture a lot of credibility. There's no technical reason why
either Donut or Eclair shouldn't be offered for the Galaxy, at this point it's
simply a business or resource decision Samsung has to take. But if the first
Samsung Android smartphone is already failing in terms of OS-version upgrades,
how should possible future customers be confident that this won't happen with
the next Samsung Android smartphone again?
Other manufactures like HTC are way more active in this space and even upgraded
the yet outdated T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream from Android 1.0 to Android 1.5 with a
later update to Android 1.6.
Cheers ~ Arne
