FroYo’s on Android menu, but will manufacturers serve it?

The fact that Google would be revealing the latest version of Android at its I/O Conference at San Francisco was a foregone conclusion. So when the wraps were officially taken off Android 2.2, codenamed FroYo, there was appreciative applause, but it was not actually much of a surprise. The appreciative applause continued right through the announcements about the new features in FroYo, and not surprisingly, before the day was out, we had the inevitable comparisons with the (yawn!) iPhone and how FroYo would herald a new era in Android, consolidating its challenge to be the hottest smartphone OS in town.

We would, however, like to bide our time before making any predictions. We do not doubt the judgment of those who are going ga-ga over FroYo. Honestly, we are extremely impressed too – it looks fantastic and works at the rate of knots. The problem is that we only all too well remember what happened with previous Android updates – Google rolled them out, but cellphone manufacturers took their own sweet time transferring them to their handsets. Perhaps the best example of this tawdriness was seen in the case of the first truly impressive Android handset, the HTC Hero. The phone won rave reviews and put Android on the smartphone map in the real sense when it was launched in July last year. But alas, it was updated to version 2.1, ironically on the very day that Google launched version 2.2 of Android, by which time it had run out of steam and ceded ground to the likes of the Motorola Droid/Milestone.

And the Hero is not the only device to have suffered this fate. Many is the Android handset owner who is wringing their hands at their inability to upgrade their handset to the latest version of the OS without “rooting” (the Android version of Jailbreaking) it. The only handset that is guaranteed an OS update as soon as Google rolls it out is Google’s own Nexus One, hardly a bestseller. Manufacturers seem to prefer launching new handsets with the latest version of Android to updating old ones – a decision that may make business sense but is nevertheless appallingly exploitative of consumers who have placed their faith in a new operating system.

In India, there are more than half a dozen Android devices in the market, and only three of them are running Android 2.1 – the Samsung Galaxy Spica, the HTC Legend and the Motorola Milestone. The Galaxy Spica in fact holds the distinction of being the only Android handset in India to have been updated to version 2.1, even though one has to go to a service center (and risk total data loss) to get the upgrade. Meanwhile, owners of older devices have no option but to twiddle their thumbs and hope for the best even as they see most new apps being developed for the newer versions of operating system – witness Google’s own Goggles and Gestures, which work only on Android versions 2.1 and above.

And therein lays the biggest challenge for FroYo. It may have arrived on the menu, but whether its success depends on whether the manufacturers will consent to serve it to existing Android users.