Archos 5 says hello, goodbye to Android 1.6

It would seem somebody over at Archos HQ was sipping a little too much of the Chardonnay over the holidays, as the company's latest firmware update for the 5-inch Internet Tablet has suffered something of a false start. Intended to bring the onboard Android up to the civilized ways of version 1.6 and to fix a few outstanding bugs, the update has been yanked due to the above "last-minute major issue." Mind you, when the non-toxic version does hit, you should still be wary -- it appears the latest firmware disables the hack that allowed users to re-install some Google apps missing from the default software on the device. Ah well, a shambling but active updating regimen is better than none at all.

[fdomig Posted Dec 28th 2009 6:22AM]

OT (but quite more important): HTC let Magic customers still suffer with Android 1.5 - no upgrade in sight.

[coredalae Posted Dec 28th 2009 7:46AM]

@fdomig whut my magic has the offical OTA 1.6 oO and tmo anounced they'll update to 2.0 aswell

[fdomig Posted Dec 28th 2009 9:51AM]

@coredalae apparently you have a branded Vodafone/Tmob myTouch 3G. The unbranded HTC magic still has 1.5 since the upgrades come from HTC directly.

[kikkerland Posted Dec 29th 2009 7:59PM]

@fdomig HTC has always been appalling with updates. I speak as a long-suffering HTC TyTN II owner and its slideshow video performance due to the lack of a driver, despite 'accelerated graphics' being touted as a feature in marketing literature, and on the box itself.

[gp Posted Dec 28th 2009 6:28AM]

"Archos HQ was sipping a little too much of the Chardonnay over the holidays"

I'm sure that if they had released it and found the bug later you would have said the same. But that's quite normal: there's nothing that can satisfy the little blogger filled with hate and frustration.

[rederikus Posted Dec 28th 2009 6:38AM]

At least they were honest about it. Better this way than to do what Western Digital did a while back and to brick their devices with an upgrade.

Me, I'll take the Chardonnay any day over buggy software.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 28th 2009 6:42AM]

Android may be in trouble if Google can't get this firmware disparity under control. You've got 28% of users on 1.5, 54% on 1.6 and only about 17% on 2.x That's not good for developers. We already have quite a few 1.6 only apps and we're starting to see 2.x only apps now. It's really quite a bad situation for users.

[kiyu727 Posted Dec 28th 2009 7:50AM]

@(Unverified)
so you find it better for the end-user to be 100% on 1.5 ?
Im happily on my droid/milestone with 2.0 and rather prefer this than 1.5 which I had on my Archos 5 IT (sold due to daily [is there a word like hourly?] rebooting)

[therockr92 Posted Dec 28th 2009 8:34AM]

Yay! We're apparently minorities!

*cries in confusion*

[Chefgon Posted Dec 28th 2009 8:40AM]

It's relatively rare for a program to run on only 1.6 or only 2.0, the vast majority of programs will run on all post-1.1 systems with no trouble at all.

[HW90 Posted Dec 28th 2009 8:42AM]

@(Unverified) it's not google's problem

it's very hard to fix due to android's nature as it has to be optimized for certain hardware, otherwise android would be far behind and be quite sluggish.

think of windows, due to the fact it has to be able to work on many types of hardware, they can't optimize it without it taking up a lot of R&D. If they did optimize it for say a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 1GB of memory, it would be as fast as using unoptimized Windows with a Core i7.

[ChazClout Posted Dec 28th 2009 7:05AM]

I'm using the Android 1.6 release now and it's been fine for me so far.

The loss of the market was a bit crap but I've found most of the apps I want and installed the apk files. (Only free market applications mind you, no warez)

[Grantholidays Posted Dec 28th 2009 7:42AM]

Google should open the market for Archos and ODROID. They just follow gooooooogle way.

[Showbiz Posted Dec 28th 2009 8:52AM]

They probably found a way to charge something for themselves and are working out the details.

Typical Archos crap.

[HW90 Posted Dec 28th 2009 11:29AM]

@Showbiz I guess you don't know the reasons for archos' plug-in scheme

They know quite a few people don't need those codecs, and since they have to pay for those codecs, it would raise the price unnecessarily to add them in.

[kikkerland Posted Dec 29th 2009 8:03PM]

@(Unverified) "They know quite a few people don't need those codecs, and since they have to pay for those codecs, it would raise the price unnecessarily to add them in."

Nice defense, Unverified. Now, let's change 'Archos' for 'Apple'. Can you imagine the uproar from the apple hating legions if they tried to pull a stunt like that? I can. Why should we let Archos get away with it?