Comment by flatulent1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flatulent1 | Hacker News Reader

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>This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS.

Huh? If Dell shipped a PC with an old version of Ubuntu, would anyone really have a problem getting up to date? If Dell hasn't added anything compelling to Android, what is stopping people from getting the latest vanilla version from someplace besides Dell?

I thought the openness and freedom from restrictions were supposed to be the strong points of Android. If you don't like one fork, can't you just load another?

Maybe I've missed something big. (I'm not an Android user and don't claim to be an expert) I am puzzled that a forum with so many developers has most acting like users are helpless in this matter. What's the dang deal??

Hopefully most phones aren't stale out of the box, but without updates all would become that way. Other than seeming old already, isn't the Dell really like the rest?

I'm not 100% sure about the dell phone, but with a few of the android phones that I've been looking at, the OS image needs to be signed. So, to upgrade your samsung galaxy s to 2.2, you need to wait for samsung to release their version of 2.2. When they decide to stop releasing updates for your model, you're out of luck (jail-breaking aside).

I really, really wish it were as easy as downloading an update from android.com and installing it, but that marginalizes the manufacturers.

Or in the case of my Samsung Moment, the Radio Interface Layer is flaky and will cause random data lockups. Samsung officially stopped updating the phone back around May (yay, 8 months of support from release date!), so even if I could continue upgrading my OS without their help, nobody will ever fix the hardware driver, it will always randomly lock up.

I'm not sure what you mean by the OS image needs to be signed, but it's not true in the sense people usually mean when they talk about signed code.

Most Android phones have the bootloader locked down, but that is different to requiring signed code.

You can run 2.2 on the Samsung Galaxy S now (eg, http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0, and I think there are pre-release official Samsung versions around too). You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process.

(Sorry if you knew this - it's not clear if your jail-breaking aside comment applied to the updates for phones or the upgrade)

> You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process.

Does it void your warranty like it does on the Nexus One?

I assume so, but it's reversible

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