14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan-based mobile phone maker HTC Corporation announced several weeks ago plans to update all Android-based handsets it launched during the ongoing year to the latest flavor of the platform, namely Android 2.2 Froyo. The company reinforced that saying a while ago, when it unveiled plans to start pushing the update out starting with the third quarter of the year, and has detailed a little more on the matter recently.
Eric Lin, HTC's global PR and online community manager, said recently that the company does not plan on rushing things up with the release of Android 2.2 Froyo as it wants to make sure that all apps and features work as planned, a recent article on Pocket-lint states. However, he did say that the updates would come out much faster than previous upgrades did.
“It takes time to port all of our applications over to Froyo and then make sure that it is running well on each of our devices,” Lin stated. “That’s not like a one week kind of project. We need to make sure that our applications are taking advantage of the Froyo features. To make sure that they’re all running properly on the OS now that it’s a new version. And then to make sure that it's running on our hardware as well as we expect.”
The Android 2.2 OS comes with a wide range of changes when compared to the Android 2.1 platform, but it seems that none of them is major, which would enable HTC to make the move faster than with upgrading handsets from Android 1.5 or 1.6 to Android 2.1. “Switching from 2.1 to 2.2, they made a lot of tweaks, but they didn’t make any gigantic changes, so it should be a much swifter process,” Lin stated, adding that “we would be done with our Froyo updates before Christmas.”
No details were unveiled on the company's plans for the next version of Android, supposedly codenamed Gingerbread. According to Lin, Google hasn't made an official announcement on the matter until now, and chances are that we won't see the solution on the market before the end of the ongoing year.