This post was supposed to be about the hassles of Android but with the looming arrival of Ice Cream Sandwich I figured I'd just point out the issues and explain what may be changing. Right now I have Android devices running the following Android Operating Systems:
Android 2.1 –Huawei IDEOS 7" Tablet (Unlocked)
Android 2.2 -Samsung Galaxy Tab P-1000 (Unlocked)
Android 2.2 -HTC Thundebolt 4G/LTE (Verizon Wireless)
Android 2.3 Google Android Nexus (Unlocked)
Android 3.1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 4G/LTE (Verizon Wireless)
Android 3.x Motorola Xoom Tablet 4G/LTE (Verizon Wireless) offline WiFi Only for now
Android 3.2 Huawei Media Pad (Unlocked)
I have all these devices simply because so many of our clients have been developing, or are thinking about developing software for Android, and because in many ways being aware of what is out there does actually help me, and my team, in our work with the mobile media. In many ways from a multimedia bleeding edge development standpoint I find more "invention" going on in the Android world vs. iOS, but when it comes to my preferred set of devices, the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch always seem to win out–simply because it all works the same way.
With Android some apps I have on 2.x are not at all found on 3.x. There's a constant string of UPDATES but to Android's credit, they had the "here are all your apps, which do you want on this new device before Apple did. But as a result of the need to always update this and that, Android feels more like Windows, while Apple's iOS feels more like the Mac in experince.
With the looming arrival of Ice Cream Sandwich, it looks like the unified experience between devices will be there. I'm just hoping that the 4.0 release is backwards compatible and I can get everything I own in the Android world on the same OS. I'm not holding my breathe because between carrier version and manfacturers versions of Android, nothing is ever quite the same.
