Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0 | Hacker News Reader

Google says Nexus One too old for Android 4.0

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89 pointstilt141 comments

I've always wondered about this, especially in embedded devices. Amongst the many mistakes Microsoft made with Vista, first and foremost was allowing the bloat to get so bad that it wouldn't run at all on machines that ran XP quite happily. Later Windows 7 could actually run on those old XP machines with many, if not most, of the features that Vista bragged about.

So here we have Google, arguably a company which can hire all of the worlds best engineers, why are they succumbing to the code first and ask questions later philosophy that gave Microsoft such heartburn?

Andy, I know you read HN, tell the team that their bonus depends on Android 4.0 being runnable on a Nexus 1. It isn't about supporting the platform with the least market share of any Android phone, its about instilling in the team a philosphy that taking the time to run great on hardware of that capability pays huge dividends in the phone world.

Many engineers today were brought up in a world where the next PC will be 1.5 - 2x the 'size' of the current PC so bloat is fine, schedule is king. This is a bad philosophy in the embedded space. That 1.5 - 2x the 'size' phone means you can't cut your phone costs, you can't grow your market, you are stuck waiting only the latest / greatest chips which are always in short supply to ship volume. Help those engineers break the habit, I know they can they are smart folks. Challenge them, as Ben Horowitz would say use your lead bullets on this one.

taking the time to run great on hardware of that capability pays huge dividends in the phone world.

It really won't though, that's the problem.

The Nexus One is nearly two years old. It's somewhat of an anomaly because it'll have a higher than average number of off-contract purchases, but in general once a person's contact has run for two years they get a new phone.

Two year old phones just aren't that important. Speaking as an N1 owner, I'd love for them to be. But they aren't.

All the world is not the US, in most places the incentives aren't set up for upgrading phones "just because". But even ignoring that, the benefits to the platform as a whole for getting to upgrade as many users as possible to latest version should be obvious. And if the top range of 2 years ago isn't good enough for an upgrade, chances are that a lot of the midrange of today isn't either.

(That said, if there really is a performance bottleneck preventing the port, the most likely candidate would be the GPU. And once you've made the decision to finally embrace the GPU, there's not anything you can do to fix the problem of going with a lame GPU when speccing out the hardware 3 years ago).

in general once a person's contact has run for two years they get a new phone

That kind of market calculus made sense before the recession. Now the value proposition has changed, and while people may still buy newer hardware (such as tablets) they expect better value from their tech purchasing because increasing wealth is no longer a given. Also, people are more suspicious of corporations in general, especially ones that are sitting on a large cash pile. Public sentiment is fickle and can quickly bite a company in the ass - look at how far the stars of Groupon and Netflix have fallen in just two quarters.

The idea that everyone should replace their smartphone every two years says either that your firm is not interested in supplying the less well-off, or else that it doesn't much care whether its products end up in landfill or not. Sure, Apple locks down its hardware platform so tightly that maintaining backwards compatibility is far easier than it is for Google, but note how Apple products maintain a high resale value and that allows them to sell new ones at a premium price point without hurting demand. Apple may be hard to deal with for developers, but Apple consumers feel the firm treats them like Kings or Queens. Google overlooks this market positioning strategy at its peril; loyalty is a two-way street, and the firm should know this very well given its historical disruption of the Yahoo/Altavista/Lycos triumvirate that dominated search back in ~1998.

Those downvotes need an explanation. If you think it's Apple fanboyism, I'd like to point out that I own 3 Android devices, beta-tested the CR-48, and have never owned anything from Cupertino.

I'm not so sure about that. You can (probably- I'll be honest, I haven't checked for sure) get a more powerful Android handset than a Nexus One for free if you sign a new two-year agreement right now. There's very little to lose there- except having to take on a two year plan. Except...

Also, people are more suspicious of corporations in general, especially ones that are sitting on a large cash pile. Public sentiment is fickle and can quickly bite a company in the ass - look at how far the stars of Groupon and Netflix have fallen in just two quarters.

I'm extremely skeptical of the former claim- people's anger is directed towards banks, not large corporations with hordes of cash (by and large). If they were, people would hate Apple.

Groupon and Netflix are both things that you can quite conceivably do without. A cellphone these days is seen as an essential, so signing up for a new two year term isn't such a friction point. You're going to need cellphone service from somewhere, after all.

There's very little to lose there- except having to take on a two year plan.

Creditworthiness is a major barrier for many people. Many more resent being tied to a single vendor. Hence the increasing market share of non-contract vendors, although they've been taking a beating too because cell service demand at the bottom end is highly elastic compared to food and housing.

If you're an existing customer of a cell phone provider without a contract, I kind of doubt they'll refuse to sign you up to a new two-year contract because of credit quality, as long as you've been paying your bils. It doesn't make sense to drive you to jump to another carrier.

A 2-year contract costs $20/month more than a comparable month-to-month plan. (T-mobile's Even More /Plus plans make this explicit.) That's where the phone subsidy comes from.

That may be the case for T-Mobile but it certainly is not universal. AT&T offers nothing like that, AFAIK.

That would explain why the US version of the Nexus One has T-mobiles 3G band and not AT&Ts.

In Canada, phone contracts are 3 year.

I bought an Apple 3G new in August 2009, after the 3GS came out and it felt like obsolete junk with the next major iOS upgrade, long before the contract expired. I certainly did not feel like I was treated like a king.

I was certainly not the only one: http://appletoolbox.com/2010/06/iphone-3g-slow-after-ios-4-0...

None of the suggestions worked.

I have a Motorola Atrix now.

This story Sounds like total BS to me coming from a Google employee.

No, it's correct that iOS 4.0 was a huge performance hit on the 3G: it significantly increased iOS memory requirements, on a phone which was already memory constrained It was unusably slow.

iOS 4.2 improved some things and made it usable again, but the phone was still nowhere near as responsive as under iOS 3.1

On the other hand, rsheridan6 had bought a year-old design.

>On the other hand, rsheridan6 had bought a year-old design.

Well, yes, my previous 3G had been stolen, I needed a replacement right away, and I couldn't afford the premium for the 3GS right then. But if the 3G was intended to be obsolete less than a year after I bought it, it was a dick move to sell it with a 2 year contract. I don't think it's too much to ask that a phone not be obsolete before the contract runs out.

But I have learned my lesson. I'm only buying top-of-the-line from now on. I need to switch to Verizon because I moved to an area where they have the only decent network, and I'm holding out for the Rezound or Nexus Prime (Nov 10th).

But this also favors Android over the iPhone. New iPhones only come out every so often. Suppose your iPhone broke/got lost/got stolen at a time when the current iPhone is 8 months into its lifecycle. Your choices are to sign a 2 year contract for a phone that will be likely be obsolete before the contract runs out, pay an exorbitant cash price, go without a phone until the next release, or buy a cheap phone with no contract and wait for the next release. Or you could buy Android. There's always a latest and greatest Android phone that's not more than a month or so old.

That's right, only Google shills are anything other than 100% satisfied with the iPhone. That's why Android is selling more than the iPhone now.

Nobody is denying the way 3G users got screwed. I should know, I'm still paying out a contract for my 3G which was boxed up long ago and replaced with a 4. However this situation didn't repeat itself with the 3GS & iOS 5. They learned from that and corrected it, especially now that they are still selling it. iOS 5 runs beautifully on the 3GS.

Point being, all of the Android phones released around the original iPhone and iPhone 3G have most definitely been cut off. However, the Nexus One is newer than the 3GS, not to mention the benchmark model for that generation of Android device, and it has already been cut off.

This is separate from the 3G issue which was bad, but is in the past at this point. It's also arguable that even slow 3G users are better off than users of the same era stuck with Android 1.5/1.6. Hell, just throw ultrasn0w on your 3G and it becomes perfectly usable again.

I use an IPod and I don't feel treated as a King, more like a pigeon: It is my gadget, with my music in it, and I am being forced to use a software I dislike (iTunes) which don't even work on my OS of choice.

You have a weird view on how Kings are treated, or on Apple itself.

You chose to buy an iPod. If you don't like the way it works, buy a different device.

Getting a new phone every two years is unsustainable, not to mention the problem with securing the necessary rare earth metals to continue building them.

I appreciate you acknowledging the products ending up in a landfill.

We really need to change the way we do things not just because of the recession but because it is entirely unsustainable.

I had hope google would recognize this problem but it seems they are more interested in the bottom line.

Supporting a two year old phone might be important to say X% of users, but I'd argue that Android phones include features that are important to Y% << X% of users.

My girlfriend cares way more that her 3GS runs iOS5 than she does that it doesn't have a 4.5" screen.

What does iOS 5 do that she actually needs? My nontechnical friend anecdote is the opposite: she likes the big screen and Swype on the Evo, and doesn't care what OS point version it's running.

This is just simply not sustainable. Everyone cannot get a new phone every two years indefinitely.

Android is not a real-time OS and is not designed for embedded devices. the kernel is not real time and java has severe latency problems caused by asynchronous garbage collection. A workaround is to allow the garbage collector to run on a separate core (one of ICS's main feature), but Nexus One's cpu is single core. I guess Google did not have the foresight to design Android to disable garbage collection. as I mentioned before, automatic garbage collection is disabled in iOS/Obj C primarily because of performance issues/battery life.

The Nexus S also has only a single core, but is already scheduled to get ICS, and I actually already have an SDK port running on it just fine. I think the more plausible excuse is that the Nexus One has a pitiful amount of onboard ROM, which already has issues with limited space for both the OS and apps in 2.3. Granted there are SDK ports to the N1 already as well, but I wonder just how much space is available on the device for applications. Even though installing apps to SD card is supported, it's not optimal, and certain apps just won't work that way.

I was explaining why Android is not designed for embedded devices. Sure ICS can run on phones with one core as long as their fast enough but theere will always be lag and delays due to the garbage collector constantly running in the background.

This isn't a hardware capacity issue. The Snapdragon has a 1 GHz CPU very similar to the Cortex A8, an Adreno 200 GPU broadly comparable to an SGX 535, and the same 512MB of DRAM that all the other phones of its generation have.

Its UMTS radio wouldn't make the cut on today's store shelves, and its camera sucks. But fundamentally this is about planned obsolescence. Google doesn't want to have to pay to maintain the driver stack and QA infrastructure for an old phone.

Both the Nexus S and Nexus GS use an SGX540 which is fair jump in GPU performance.

A fair jump, but not a huge one. The Adreno 200 is an ES2 part with acceptable performance. I'd be very surprised if there were serious performance problems under ICS, but obviously without having seen the software we can't say.

> This isn't a hardware capacity issue.

The Nexus One has 512MB of internal storage. The Nexus Galaxy has 32GB of internal storage. If ICS weighs in at much more than 400MB and has the stellar (read as: "perfunctory") MicroSD support we've come to expect from Android, it'd be about as enjoyable as a fart in a spacesuit on a Nexus One.

That's a good point. They may not be able to fit the standard image. But if that's the only issue, then expect Cyanogenmod et. al. to have this fixed within weeks. Running real filesystems on the sdcard has been routine in the AOSP community since forever.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little blown away that ICS could come in close to 512MB. That sounds like bloat to me.

Are new features bloat? Code doesn't take up zero space, you know.

iOS 5 ZIP-compressed install files are 700MB each, a 500MB Android wouldn't be terribly surprising.

(Encrypted and then compressed, however, so it's essentially the same as the uncompressed size.)

Just to clarify what you're saying here: Are you saying that simply because a file is encrypted, that it'd be equivalent to the uncompressed size?

There are a fair few modes of encryption (such as CFB, OFB and CTS) out there which ensure that the encrypted data is the same size as the input data. Even if Apple uses a mode which requires padding, the padding should not be so large as to increase the size of the iOS image to the size that you are suggesting.

Encrypted data is not very compressible. Compression algorithms exploit statistical regularities in the bitstream, whereas the whole point of encrypting something is to get a result with no statistical regularity whatsoever.

If you compress first and then encrypt, you can then get smaller file sizes than the input, because the compression algorithm can work on the plaintext.

And iOS doesn't do that?

Let me get this conversation straight.. Someone says that it's strange that android is so large. Someone else says iOS is big too. Then someone comes in to say that they are not large, they just suck at getting the compress/encrypt issue right. No one, other than obtino, thinks that it was simply a mistake that Xuzz put 'then' in his/her post?

It's compressed after encryption, so the effects of the compression is minimal. I believe that my post was correct: due to the effects of the encryption, the compression is almost useless, rendering the large iOS file size essentially equivalent to the size when installed to disk. That's all.

This is correct, and yet at the same time I believe it is incorrect. I am totally willing to believe I'm wrong here, though (as it has been two years since I actually did this process manually). I will explain. ;P

So, it is my understanding that an IPSW file is a ZIP archive containing a number of files, the largest one being where the main filesystem is stored. This file is encrypted, and does not compress very well at all.

However, that file is itself a dmg (Apple disk image) file, which is a compressed file format: a dmg is a compressed HFS+ image. Therefore, the encryption is happening after the compression.

Therefore, I do not believe it is accurate to claim that this is key to the problem. While it is humorous that the files are being compressed, encrypted, and then compressed again, that is not what is causing them to fail to compress: the first compression should work.

Instead, if we go one level deeper, we can ask the question "what is Apple even storing on this filesystem", and the answer is "maybe one or two hundred megabytes of executable code, and a few hundred megabytes of graphics".

The images are stored as PNG and JPEG: file formats that are already compressed. We therefore would not expect the version in the final output file to be much smaller than that on the filesystem. These files are, in essence, being compressed, compressed, encrypted, and compressed. ;P

The executable code, meanwhile, really doesn't compress well with algorithms like deflate: while it has reasonably low entropy, its encoding looks irritatingly random to algorithms that are looking for sequences of bytes (or bits) that are actually identical, especially over small window sizes.

The problem is that you may see "add one, compare, branch if equal" all over the place, but it is "add one (to X), compare (with Y), branch if equal (to Z)", which breaks up the nice sequence. Even just reorganizing the data bits based on the instruction encoder then helps /tremendously/.

However, it is also often the case that X is one of just a few numbers, Z is one of a small range (loops aren't usually that large), etc.: however, normal algorithms look for "exactly this", not "something similar to this with an offset" (or even switching to a general integer encoder); again, minor details, but it breaks deflate.

...and, indeed, there are better compression algorithms out there already that are designed to handle code well. I swear Google even had some cool stuff for this, but I'm not finding it right now :(. Regardless, a quick (silly) citation for validity:

"""While we have not addressed the compression of machine code, others have shown that it is possible to compress machine code by a factor of 3 using a specially tuned version of a conventional compressor [Yu96] and by as much as a factor of 5 using a compressor that understands the instruction set [EEF +97]."""

-- http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix99/full_papers/wilson/wils...

So, yeah: I think the key problem is that Apple is not wasting disk space on the device. And, when you put it that way, it is obvious: why would Apple waste 700MB of flash on a 32GB device, space the user would probably really love to be storing music in, when they only have 100MB of entropy?

The answer is: "they wouldn't", and so (modulo the further compressibility of binaries, an interesting and partially open academic problem) the result is that most of the data on the filesystem is already compressed images/audio, and therefore compressing, encrypting, and even compressing again, doesn't matter to the result.

Here is a small test:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file count=50k bs=100 # create 5MB file of zero
  aes -e -f file -o file2 -p asdfasdf # create aes encrypted version of the file
  tar -czf file.tar.gz file # compress file
  tar -czf file2.tar.gz file2 # compress encrypted file
  du -sh file* # check size of all files

Here is the output I got:

  4.9M	file
  5.0M	file2
  8.0K	file.tar.gz
  5.0M	file2.tar.gz

These results pretty much speak for themselves. Just think of it this way, compression works by finding patterns (like every byte is zero), and only storing the patterns. If the encrypted data has patterns, then the plain text could more easily be found.

(You know you don't have to use tar for a single file, and can just gzip it outright, right? :P)

Compressing an all-zeros file is not representative of anything. Why not do it with actual text?

It depends what you want to show, in this case I was showing the size difference between a file unencrypted and encrypted. An all-zeros file has nearly no randomness, so it compressed very well. Then I show that somehow the encryption process takes away this lack of randomness, and leaves a file almost incompressible. I'm really just increasing the scale to make it more 'dramatic'.

If I happened to be showing how compressed codecs like jpeg, mp3 or h264 weren't compressible, I would definitely pick something more like an actual text file.

Well Apple, who as we know do everything right, also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

> Well Apple, who as we know do everything right

Really? Says who? The imaginary Apple-fanboy strawman?

> also made several hardware updates that left older Macs behind. So who is right?

What's "right" in this context? It's an engineering tradeoff. Considerations:

1) the cost of adding support for newer features for soon to be obsolete hardware 2) the benefits of using the added capabilities of newer hardware with no backward-compatibility restrictions (new sensors, etc). 3) the engineering effort required to make something performant in older hardware with less memory / cpu power.

From a customer standpoint, it's only wrong if the above don't hold, and the sole company's incentive is to artificially obsolete perfectly fine older devices.

I don't think Google has any incentive to obsolete older devices.

Did I say anything about Google in my comment?

Most of abandoned devices out there are by third party Android cellphone makers, who have a lot of incentive of making users just buy the new version. After all, it's their only revenue stream.

Apple, on the other hand, besides being traditionally nicer to its customers (as shown by them toping the user and support satisfaction surveys every damn year), also have the iTunes and iPhone App Store to get money off of customers with older iPhones, so they can afford to give them a new iOS version. And they also use the iPhone as a lure to their other device offerings (iPad, Macs, etc), so the benefit from users of an older iPhone not feeling left behind iOS-wise.

Perhaps the biggest reason is this: Apple still sells older models (such as the 3GS, 4G etc), especially to other parts of the world. So it's an added incentive that those are upgradable to the latest iOS.

Now, since you asked, perhaps Google doesn't want to add to their Android dev expenses the potentially huge expense of supporting older devices.

This shouldn't be a performance issue. It's a storage issue. The phones from early 2010 made by HTC had very low storage, like 512 MB, where 300-350 was occupied by the OS itself, and the rest was free for the user.

HTC Desire which basically is a Nexus One clone, couldn't even upgrade to Gingerbread+Sense, because there wouldn't be enough free storage left, so they had the choice of either using only stock Gingerbread to upgrade it, or leave it to Froyo+Sense.

Now I assume ICS is even bigger than Gingerbread, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't fit in there. Now, will we see CM9 with ICS on Nexus One? It's possible, but maybe the CM team will be able to cut what the Android team can't cut from it, and offer a more stripped down version of it.

Great. I guess I can stop hitting the "Update" thing every day in the hope that 4.0 will appear.

I can't help but note that the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch purchased the same month are already running iOS 5.0 and I haven't noticed any speed issues.

And released a half year earlier than the Nexus One, no less.

My 3GS is almost unusably slow on iOS5.

Mine too. I'm upgrading to the 4S because of this. Can't wait for the 5. I also have a Nexus One for development. I find it hard to believe it was $600 in Jan 2010 and now it's obsolete.

I wouldn't consider the Nexus One obsolete. The whole point of the N1 is that it has an unlocked bootloader, so you don't need Google's blessing to run custom roms or newer versions on your hardware.

There are already ongoing efforts to port the 4.0 SDK images to run on the Nexus One and the Nexus S, and I guarantee there will be even better options once the source code is released.

Use the freedom you paid $600 for to run ICS on your phone anyways.

Exactly. The G1 was technically EOL'd at Android 1.6, but a coworker been running 2.2 on his for well over a year now using a custom ROM.

Mine works just fine, but sometimes hardware issues will cause the slowness. I'm guessing some of the flash memory may be bad.

Check your logs/system diagnostic, if there's nothing strange try a complete reinstall (without restoring from a backup), this is abnormal, most reports are that the 3GS is as fast under iOS5 than it was under iOS4, if not faster.

You're full of it. iOS 5 runs fine on the 3GS.

I've only upgraded one of the 3GS's to iOS 5, and my experiences pretty much match this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4956/apple-ios-5-review/15

Basically, as fast or faster than 4.3. But mine is a development-only device with no music or other content, so maybe that's the difference.

This is interesting. I don't know if it's something with my phone specifically, but the whole thing just lags by a couple of seconds whenever I try to type something. It's so bad that I'm usually done typing a couple of words by the time the first characters come up on the screen ..

If you can, take it in to an Apple Store. It really sounds like you have something going wrong in hardware. Like vondur said, it sounds like bad flash memory.

I remembered when this happened to be when iOS 4 came out and I still had a 3G, a complete wipe/restore solved the problem for me that time, perhaps that will work here, YMMV.

Google updates many parts of "Android" such as Mail, Maps, Youtube, Market etc. independently of the OS. Other parts are improved not on the phone, but server side (e.g. google home page, mobile web interfaces, audio transcription). The bits that it doesn't upgrade (launcher, browser etc.) can often be replaced by 3rd parties, including repackagings of parts of later versions of AOSP.

I was pleasantly surprised how many upgrades my phone (which the vendor never took past 2.1) continually got from Google. I managed to get most of the other features from later AOSP releases, without rooting or anything harder than browsing the market.

In the end I added a custom froyo rom to get the benefit of the JIT (since the device had enough RAM to benefit from it) and will probably jump to CyanogenMod soon.

All in all, in not sure why people are so keen for Google to follow such an archaic and monolithic release model. It's as baffling as the people who care that their browser's version number is changing too fast, except in reverse. It's a mostly meaningless number.

You can start complaing the first day Google switches the new version of Youtube or Maps to supporting 4.0 or above and you actually miss out on features. Most of the stuff they are putting in the OS is hardware-related like dual-core support, NFC beam or soft-keys to replace missing buttons. Even the new font is designed for high-DPI screens.

"The... (launcher, browser etc.) can often be replaced by 3rd parties, including repackagings of parts of later versions..."

"I managed to get most of the other features..."

"I added a custom froyo rom... and will probably jump to CyanogenMod soon."

Punchline: "All in all, in not sure why people are so keen for Google to follow such an archaic and monolithic release model."

My whole point (which you've carefully elided in your response) was that you didn't need to do any of that to get the new Market, Maps, Youtube etc. on their own update schedules. Most would consider these key features and selling points of the OS and as such Apple bundles them together with OS updates and corresponding yearly(-ish) hardware releases.

Even the stuff that you have to seek out, like installing a new launcher or keyboard from the market is hardly at the level of recompiling a kernel and wouldn't even be necessary if you've already chosen a 3rd party replacement such as Swype for typing, again updated on its own schedule via the Market.

I could and did do the rest (rooting, seeking out and installing custom Roms) because I enjoy fiddling with things. I don't think a JIT is the kind of thing an average person cares about, or can make decisions about its hardware requirements. I don't recommend, or see much reason, for anyone else to do it if they are not also geeks. Your phone will not disappear in a puff of smoke, on the contrary it will still silently get better without any action on your part even if the version number on the about screen doesn't tick up.

But the facilities that lets me do all that customisation are the same thing that lets anyone use Opera or Firefox as their main browser, set to open URLs by other apps, unlike in iOS where Safari will always be the default browser. Or to change the launcher, use a different dialer or theme my phone differently. These are all good things, even if you don't use them. And there is no need to if you don't wish to.

My girlfriend is capable of clicking "yes" when iTunes ask her if she wants to update her phone, but that's about the extent of it. She's not going to go out and find third-party repackages of updated features, and she can't download custom ROMs or anything like that.

Yet, she likes new features and improvements just as much as anyone else. She might not know what a JIT is, but she'd sure notice if her web browsing got more snappy. Apple's update scheme allows everyone to enjoy new features. Google's leaves non-technical with a lesser experience.

I don't see what's so hard to understand about this, apart from the fact that people seem to want to comment on Android based on third-hand talking points rather than their own experience.

Your girlfriend, if she had bought the same phone as me, from the same vendor, would still be on Android 2.1 but without her having to do anything (apart from possibly agree to some updates when prompted on the phone) she would have the latest versions of apps such Google Maps (only requires Android 1.6 and up) which was better than iOS Maps when the phone was sold, and is still better than iOS Maps in the very latest iOS 5. It has many new features like offline maps, Google location integration, 3D vector maps etc. and she can look forward to more being added.

Meanwhile, if she'd bought a 3G (which has near identical hardware) she'd have had to plug her iPhone into a computer, updated iTunes, and then updated the iPhone to get iOS 3 after a year. She'd have had to do this again to get iOS 4, which would have nearly bricked her phone due to it's lack of speed (despite not actually providing many of the actual features of iOS 4). She could then partially fix this by updating iTunes and the iPhone again after a few point updates were released and then would no longer receive any updates to anything Apple considers part of the OS.

Both systems have ups and downs (e.g. I'm surprised that the Android browser isn't something that's updated independently as you'd think that would fit Google's goals very well, but I assume there's technical issues I don't understand). A fixation on the version number of the OS, or false stereotypes about Android and iOS, obscures all of this.

Finally, the point about the JIT (which I realise I wasn't clear about) is that it only provides benefit if the phone has sufficient RAM. Random people on Android forums would naturally assume newer=better and be disappointed that they didn't have the new shiny, but my phone was somewhat unique in having a large amount of RAM (relative to the rest of the hardware specs anyway). It's therefore a good example of people feeling like they're missing out on something, that would actually hurt their performance if they got it.

I imagine that this is not due to the n1 being "underpowered" per se, as the nexus s has roughly the same specs as the n1, but more internal storage. The problem is due to the fact that the n1 can't accommodate the ics image, which google is claiming is about twice as large in size. /speculation

I think you're right. running out of onboard space is an issue if I install too many apps on the N1.

I am constantly running out of internal space on my N1. It's the worst thing about it, and the main reason I would upgrade.

It's feasible that Cyanogenmod will release a compatible version though, isn't it?

Yes, there's a good chance of such a release considering the history of CyanogenMod [1].

Too bad the update won't be straight from Google this time. One of the key benefits of the Nexus One for nearly 2 years comes to an end.

[1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

Considering the hacker community got the SDK version ported to the Nexus One[1], I think it's entirely feasible once proper source code gets released.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUkxwT-fdI4

I'm sure. There are hacked versions of Gingerbread out there for the original Droid, even though it was officially deemed too underpowered for it. Given the number of hacker types that own a Nexus One, I'm sure it'll be on the way.

I hope Cyanogenmod or someone else will release one. Cyanogenmod version of 2.3 for N1 and other phones, came out as 'nightly' release ages before the official Google release. Does anyone know what are the hardware limitations to adapting ICS?

Do you think ICS can actually run on N1? I do not think so. Otherwise why wouldn't google provide an update?

Thus, what do you think cyanogen can do to make ICS properly run on the N1 hardware?

It might be able to run, but the performance is just so subpar that Google feels uncomfortable releasing it. I doubt it would go over well if they release ICS for the N1 and the phone is barely usable.

CM, on the other hand, will appear on any device that somebody is dedicated enough to bring it to. So if somebody really wants ICS on the N1, then they'll do it.

Gingerbread runs fine on the N1 and ICS has no higher hardware requirements (per Google themselves). Other than driver updates for hardware acceleration, there's nothing about the N1 that really disqualifies it from being able to run ICS just fine.

The N1 has 512MB of internal space, and doesn't guarantee that the user has a MicroSD card inserted. Many Android apps (including Google-provided ones) only install to internal storage, and require janky hacks to work from the SD card. If it's impossible or impractical to update or remove ICS features to fit in a half-gig, it's impossible or impractical to port ICS to the N1.

OK, but if Google isn't releasing it, isn't that an indication that it won't run very well even if you do manage to install it?

it will be built off of android open source project essentially the same thing that the nexus prime will be running. With no new hardware requirements, I don't see any indication of why it wouldn't run as well.

Why are people complaining about the Nexus One not being as great as the iPhone 4. Look at the release dates and you'll see that the Nexus One has 6 months on the iPhone 4. If anything compare it to the 3GS and you'll see that it is in fact a much better phone. Google are pushing forward with Android and the Nexus One is unfortunately being left behind. It remains the best phone I've ever owned and I'll definitely be buying a Galaxy Nexus to continue riding the Android wave.

the iPhone 3GS is better than Nexus one because it (can) runs iOS 5. your Nexus One is stuck running an old OS.

Except that there will be a CM port available probably by mid or late January.

Please take your trolling elsewhere. Last I checked HN was a place where intellectual discussion takes place. Act accordingly.

Sad panda... I was really expecting Google to support at least two more version of Android post Gingerbread for the Nexus One. Guess I'll keep the N1 around as my device for testing apps on Gingerbread/old hardware.

Apple handled this a lot better with iOS 4 and the old iPhone 3G. They simply took out features that the 3G couldn't handle. My N1 handles Gingerbread perfectly without any hiccups. Incredibly, every version of Android seemed to make my N1 faster. You couldn't say the same for iOS 3/4 on the 3G, which got worse, and any reasonable person wouldn't expect Apple to support the 3G beyond iOS 4. The N1, on the other hand, seemed like it could support at least two more versions of Android.

This is EXACTLY what I would expect from HTC. I had their products before and I got burned this way.

It is one of the reasons I switched to Apple.

Except HTC doesn't control the software on the Nexus One. Google handles all Google-experience devices like the Nexus One, Nexus S, Xoom and the new Nexus Galaxy.

I do suppose the HTC hardware is the issue here, otherwise why would google not support n1? They'd have nothing to lose.

> otherwise why would google not support n1?

Google has never really cared about support.

> They'd have nothing to lose.

They'd have to spend time porting and validating it.

How is this different than Apple's iOS5 compatibility list?

Well, besides how much easier it will be for third parties to add ICS to Nexus One.

iOS 5 runs smoothly on a 3GS, a phone older than the Nexus One.

But the last official update for the 3G turned it into a dog. I don't think any company is blameless, here, but I'm far more disappointed to see Google doing it. Linux still runs on a 386, last time I checked.

the 3G is 4 yr old. the Nexus one is only 1.5+ yr old.

here are two issues:

1) Android is suffering from feature creep / bloat

2) Unresolved design issues are biting them in the ass

FWIW, many report that iOS5 actually makes the 3GS faster. Anandtech ran some benchmarks that show the 3GS on 5.0 being faster than the iPhone 4 on 4.3 at many tasks!

I'm not convinced that you could run a 3.0 kernel image on a 386 without running out of RAM pretty soon, even if you cut it down to something pretty minimal. I haven't found any sources where anyone's actually installed modern Linux on one - they all seem to have used ancient distros because support actually vanished some time back (see eg. here: http://hackaday.com/2011/08/12/installing-linux-on-a-386-lap...).

I stand corrected, but you have my curiosity up. Nevertheless, the "decline" of hardware in the face of software advancement in phones strikes me as awfully rapid. Is the Nexus One really so underpowered that ICS couldn't be made to accommodate it?

I think the reaction is largely over the perceived short lifespan of the hardware in relation to supported software updates available to it, which in this instance favors poorly against Apple generally supplying software updates more than two years after a phone is released.

This phone is substantially younger (by six months) than Apple's oldest supported model, for one thing. And since the 3GS will be sold on an ongoing basis, it'll likely enjoy updates beyond 5.0, as well.

I'm wishing I bought an iPhone instead of my Nexus One now

I still like my Nexus One, but between the sagging power button and the lack of "real" multitouch, I'm not inclined to buy another HTC product next time.

The buggy multi-touch was the worse thing on the Nexus One, and was very falsely advertised on some sites. I really thought that it had a working multi-touch solution before I paid the mountain of importing fees to get it into Canada.

I do still like it too, it just could've been that much better without much more effort put into it.

I have the Nexus one and am not too pleased with this, the phone isn't that old, and I assumed we would get ICS on it.

It's sad when a phone that's only 1.5 years old is "too old". I really enjoyed my N1 with Cyanogenmod, but switched back to iPhone when news of T-Mobile's acquisition by AT&T started coming out.

For a site called hackernews, it surprises me that people actually care about this. There will be so many available roms for ICS with source code release, and any phone that is at least running CM7 should have no worries. Its almost impossible to brick a phone during the root process and for a 2 year old phone to not attempt to root at this point, would not be using your hardware to its full benefit.

So by the end of the year Android developers will have 5 different versions (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0 and 4.0) of Android in the wild and over 40% of which are running a version that's almost 18 months old (2.2) with no upgrade path.

And they say fragmentation isn't an issue...

It's Nokia and Symbian all over again.

There's no incentive for Google to provide backward compatibility for Android, hence they don't.

Well, it would make people feel more confident about buying Android devices. I am not happy to discover that I am going to be stuck with a browser that chokes on most newspaper webpages (a lot of them keep reloading some 3rd party widget that renders the page unusuable after about 30-40 seconds).

What prevents you from using firefox or opera?

I like the way the stock browser renders normal webpages. I don't care for the 3rd party browser interfaces, and I don't think it's too much to expect the stock browser to be reasonably robust - for the same reason that I expect the default wheels on a car to be sufficient for normal driving.

You should give Dolphin Browser a try. The best mobile browser. Period.

I did. It's great. I still think the stock browser should 'just work,' considering that Google also makes Chrome. I want to evaluate competitors' offerings in terms of added functionality, not basic stability. It's a bad advert for Android, just like inferior wheels on a car would be a bad advert for the car manufacturer.

Very true. Since Google makes Chrome, which is excellent on the desktop, there's no excuse to let us deal with the 'Browser'. Android has always been a 'work in progress' and it's been too long now.

Then what's the incentive for Apple to do just that? IOS5 runs on the iPhone 3GS, which is older than the Nexus One.

The difference is that 3GS is still being sold. N1 wasn't available on shelves well over one year.

People who purchase iOS devices are Apple's customers. People who purchase Android devices are not Google' s customers

Google sold thousands (millions?) of N1 phones at a significant price. Those buyers certainly are Google's customers. Well, they were, until Google blew them off 5 minutes after purchase.

I've got both the Nexus One and an iPhone 4 and I can never understand why anyone would choose the Nexus One over an iPhone, it's such an inferior product both hardware and software wise. The comparatively poor quality as put me off anything but iPhones.

The Nexus One is really more comparable to the 3Gs and I think it stands up well against it. I bought mine since I wanted an unlocked phone that didn't require a custom hack to accomplish. I've been considering going back to an iPhone 4s if Apple decides to sell it unlocked from their store.

The online store (at least the US one: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...) says the unlocked version is coming in November but I think that if you buy one from an Apple retail store you can get it unlocked now.

Kind of... if you buy it without extending your existing contract with AT&T, it'll be unlocked when you activate it. I don't think you can just roll in and buy it for cash and without an existing carrier account.

I believe they will come November, according to their store page.

One, the N1 was released almost half a year earlier, so it's not like everyone was snubbing the iPhone 4 to get the N1. Two, some people prefer Android to iOS, and the N1 was one of the better Android phones at the time (and the only 'pure' experience).

I started with an N1 and later got an iPad 2. I found I had to turn off all push notifications and was surprised that apple would put out something that had such inferior usability when the notification dropdown thing that Android has is so clearly better. Maybe they didn't want to copy the people they despised? Or maybe they just couldn't find the engineering time until 5.0? I dunno. It was unbearable. I had to turn all of the push notifications off because I just couldn't handle being interrupted by a modal dialog all the time.

The other thing that really stinks on the iPad compared to the N1 is the non-multi-tasking of apps. Everytime I switch to a different app it starts all over again... Really? Really.

In general iOS was really pretty, and really usable. Maybe I was just aculturated to the android way of handling multi-tasking and notifications, but those two things alone made me think, "I can't believe people put up with this stuff..." :)

I was doing the same thing. I had a Nexus One and an iPad 2. My Nexus One crashed 12 times while I happily used my iPad 2 without problems.

Dunno why you got downmodded... Anyway, yeah the Nexus One is definitely not bug free. But it's been the case with things on the iPad too, but in general it's pretty stable. I don't use it as much throughout the day as the N1 though, so, I don't really have a great stability sense for it. Also, this kind of goes to the apples-to-oranges value of my experience, since I'm using the two things fairly differently.

He got downvoted because he's a troll.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chugger

> I found I had to turn off all push notifications and was surprised that apple would put out something that had such inferior usability when the notification dropdown thing that Android has is so clearly better.

You may want to note that iOS was released more than a year before Android. The notifications have been essentially untouched between iPhoneOS 1 and iOS 5.

> The other thing that really stinks on the iPad compared to the N1 is the non-multi-tasking of apps. Everytime I switch to a different app it starts all over again... Really? Really.

Not really no, you might want to update your iPad at least to the OS released 16 months ago.

The iPad had whatever came with the iPad2 by default, which I assumed was the latest, maybe it wasn't. Anyway, I haven't upgraded to 5 yet since it has seemed wrinkly for a lot of people.

Wrt notifications... I just don't understand _why_ they didn't touch it between iOS1 and iOS5. It was so bad :) I'm sure it's much better now.

> I just don't understand _why_ they didn't touch it between iOS1 and iOS5.

My guess is: limited engineering power and other things they considered more critical to user-experience (however misguided their consideration was).

It's cheaper, much cheaper data plans available. It's unlocked and you can take it overseas, pop in a SIM you got in the airport for $10 and have voice and data in your local country. Gmail is better than Apple Mail. Maps app is better. Has wifi hotspot and carriers can't prevent tethering.

Those are the reasons I chose a N1 over the 3gs that was available at the time. Now that Apple is releasing a truly unlocks 4s I'm taking a serious look.

My Nexus One made my girlfriend jealous enough to give up her 3GS and come over to Android. YMMV.

Nexus One was released in January 2010. Too soon to be "retired" after only 2 years.

Nexus One was seriously "flawed" for having only 512MB of internal storage. I had to uninstall tons of applications just to update the built in ones.

This is the killer. Google keeps piling more junkware apps onto internal storage, and not enabling the SD bit for their apps.

I am constantly making calls of which 1MB non-SD app to evict, while Browser and Maps and friends pile on 5-10MB each. And there isn't even any piracy(?)-related reason to make these apps internal-only, like there is for paid apps.

My N1 is a constant state of "Browser storage full" since the latest round of app updates.

my gf's CDMA Hero (released October 11, 2009 w/Cupcake!) is running CyanogenMod 7.1 (Gingerbread), runs better than stock HTC sense trash.

"won't run on Nexus One", you say?

it'll run back-to-back Ironman triathlons

Boo. Of course I do not expect all the advanced features or substitutes for things that are not supported by the older hardware, but Google promoted ICS strongly as a 'run everywhere' version designed to save developers from the hardware fragmentation issue. Between me, my wife, and my brothers-in-law, we have 7 or 8 Android devices in this household, and I was looking forward to a more unified operating environment.

Damn. This bums me out.

The sunset photo as the wallpaper on the phone in the article is appropriate. Still love my Nexus One.

NOOOOOO!!!! HTC EVO 4G NO HAS 4.0 upgrade? Noes!!! NOOOOES!!!!!! I am very sad now.

As a side note, at these speeds, feels like windows xp has less hardware reqs than android :P

Well, this is absolute bullshit.

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