I got an HTC Hero in December — it’s a nice phone. I like it. I knew that Android 2.0 would be out not longer after I got my phone, so I checked the web to see if it would be possible to update the phone to the latest version (since frankly Android 1.6 is not that big a deal). Lo and behold — HTC promised that the Hero would get an update in December, so I figured it would be out in January or February. The update still hasn’t arrived and Android is now up to 2.2. HTC has, in the meantime, promised to provide 2.1 updates, but I’m not holding my breath for any update from them.
The main rant of this post however is not so much about the Hero or HTC, but more about Android and specifically why it won’t matter.
The Android operating system is in many ways similar to Windows. No, it doesn’t run your favourite first person shooter or Microsoft Office, and that’s not what I’m talking about. Android is an operating system and nothing else. It is not a list of hardware specifications, it doesn’t contain any details on how things are booted or how memory is managed or accessed the processor. It doesn’t say anything about how discs are organized or — and this is the important bit — how to install a new version of it. In those ways it is very similar to Windows.
Android cannot simply be installed on a phone or a device, and this one thing is the one thing that is lacking for Android to really matter. Since I cannot, in a simple way, brew my own version and install it on my phone, it doesn’t matter if it’s Android or Windows Phone 7 Series (or what ever permutation of those words make up the name of the latest version of the worst phone OS out there). Using Linux as the kernel specifically doesn’t matter for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that I, as a programmer, have no way of communicating with kernel.
If Android included a boot mechanism it would fix all the problems at once — but being that it’s google who’s developing the operating system it’s not likely that we will ever have that.
