Sprint is kicking off their 9th annual developers conference this week and the focus is Android. We were unable to attend and I’m posting this in hopes that some developers will read this and get Sprint to comment.
As most of you know, Sprint just launched the HTC Hero and plans to drop the Samsung Moment on November 1, 2009. We think both phones are great, but our major gripe is that these devices are shipping with the outdated Android 1.5. This means that applications that take advantage of all the new APIs in Android 1.6 will be unable to run on Sprint’s new phones.
When I was snooping around CTIA, I spoke with representatives from HTC, Samsung, and Sprint who would not give me a clear cut answer on when these phones might receive Android 1.6. They said Sprint might not offer OTA upgrades and all mentioned the file size of updates as being the problem. As some of our readers pointed out, Sprint has done Palm Pre updates well over 80 MB so we are confused by this so called “10 MB limitation”.
If you are at the Sprint conference tomorrow, ask these two questions:
- What is Sprint’s strategy for OTA updates on Android phones?
- When will Sprint roll out Android 1.6 to their current Android phones?
I would love to be wrong on this one, but I have seen nothing from Sprint that can explain what they plan to do about this issue.