Missing out on the new features in 1.6

I’ve been enjoying my HTC Magic (black coloured model) phone powered by Android that I picked up from Rogers since early this summer. It was a tough choice for my first smart phone between Googles mobile operating system and going with an iPhone. Do I go for the proven iPhone and it’s massive app base or help support the open system and possibly create some apps myself.

So far I’ve really loved the phone. I have found the apps I need in Androids much smaller market and it integrates wonderfully with my Gmail account so I have all of my contacts and my calendar whenever I need them. I was worried about the small internal memory of the phone but I still haven’t used half of it and I easily have a dozen or two apps in there.

One of my biggest complaints about the phone was the fact that I couldn’t install and run apps from the SD card which would have made storage a non issue when I slap a 16GB card in there. Why this is not standard for the operating system I have no idea, but like I said, it hasn’t become an issue for me yet.

That leaves my biggest issue really pertaining to Rogers, my mobile carrier. I still can’t purchase apps from the Android Market (nor can other Canadians) and Google says it’s Rogers issue. Rogers says it’s Googles issue. Ok fine, nobody wants to take hold of the issue and solve it for their customers…I get it…I guess.

Lets not even talk about 2.0...

Since I have a lot of the apps I want it wasn’t a huge deal. However, what started to become a huge deal was operating system updates. Android launched it’s version 1.6 (code named Donut) back in September/October so I patently waited for an update to come over the air. And I waited. A co-worker also picked up an Android (he picked up the HTC Dream) and we started poking around trying to figure out what was going on. Were we going to get 1.6 and it’s new features?

Not long after 1.6, the 2.0 SDK was released and it was clear we were falling behind. New Android phones were being announced weekly and things were really starting to take shape for Android – it was fun to be part of. We kept searching for answers, calls to Rogers weren’t helpful, we figured Rogers was screwing us. We were locked into a three year term on Android 1.5 that was already outdated.

Recently I stumbled upon a few threads and a bit of a movement forming for the Rogers and Android 1.6 issue. A bunch of guys with a bit more motivation, ok A LOT more, than me were on Rogers about this trying to force the issue for a solid answer. The thread was started back in October and you can read it in it’s entirety here. There is also a Facebook group here that people can join regarding this issue.

All I can say is that I sure hope they do something about it soon because it’s going to be expensive to upgrade the hardware through Rogers just to be able to get an up to date operating system for my phone. Maybe Googles new phone will be a solution? Or maybe the new carrier Wind will be nice competition and a good place to switch to.

Maybe once this is all sorted out I’ll finally develop an app of my own…maybe…

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