Should you upgrade your mobile OS?

This month’s column is inspired by a tweet from PC Pro reader James Franklin, who asks: “I’m confused by the various versions of Android. I found most of the web resources confusing – can you explain the differences?”

That’s a really good question, and James isn’t the first to ask it. You don’t normally get any choice over which version of Android (or indeed, other mobile OS) is installed on your phone when you buy, but during ownership of that device several updates and upgrades are likely to become available, so it’s important to understand what enhancements each of these offers, and whether that makes it worth the hassle of upgrading.

Why might you choose not to upgrade? Surely it’s always best to keep a phone up to date? First, there’s a risk – albeit slight – that the process may fail and end up “bricking” your phone. (For those unfamiliar with this term, it means trashing the ROM so the phone will never switch on again, making it useful only for propping up table legs.)

Why might you choose not to upgrade? Surely it’s always best to keep a phone up to date?

Second, in certain cases updating may wipe your phone’s memory, which would result in you having to reinstall all your apps and restore your data, music, documents and so on.

Third, depending on the OS involved and how full your phone is, you may easily spend an hour or so updating it. Fourth, there’s a risk that the update may introduce new bugs, or change how functions work in ways that annoy you.

Fifth, you may find that apps you’ve paid money for no longer run properly. And last, of course, maybe you’re happy with your phone just the way it is.

Update advantages

All that said, updating can bring advantages, too. You may find a new release adds useful features to your phone, and battery life may be significantly improved running newer code. Sometimes 3G and Wi-Fi performance will be enhanced.

You may also find you need a new OS version to run more recently developed apps, which seems to be especially true of Apple’s devices. If you stick with an older OS version you’ll find the range of apps, and even the updates available for older apps, starts to trickle away.

Updating to the latest version of a mobile OS isn’t always easy. For a start, some older phones aren’t physically capable of running the new version, since they don’t have enough RAM or other resources.

Manufacturers don’t always release updates for their older handsets, to encourage you to upgrade to a newer model. For those of you with network-locked handsets, you won’t only need its manufacturer to release new firmware, but also to wait for this to go through the network’s own testing and approval process, which may involve an additional delay of weeks or even months.

Manufacturers don’t always release updates for their older handsets, to encourage you to upgrade to a newer model

Depending on your mobile OS, you can get round some of these problems by downloading unofficial ROMs from sites such as MoDaCo, xda-developers, CrackBerry and more. Some sites even have “kitchen” facilities that enable you to “cook” your own ROM by selecting a base version of the OS and then including or excluding various features – by removing the bits you never use, you’ll end up with more free storage for apps and other files.

Apple updates

So, you have an elderly phone still running an old OS: what does each new release bring to the party? Let’s start by looking at iOS on Apple devices, which is the simplest case because the number of models available is so small.

Often a new iOS release will coincide with new Apple hardware – for example, the original iPhone was supplied with iOS 1, and 2 came along with the iPhone 3G.

The big feature that iOS 2 added was access to the App Store – so frankly, you’d have to be bonkers, or some kind of Apple fundamentalist, to be still running iOS 1 (not that they’re mutually exclusive). Many believe Apple’s App Store was the first phone app download shop, but that isn’t true, since both Windows Mobile and Symbian had app stores way before “the” App Store.

Version 2 of iOS added push email, contacts and calendar, as well as security policies and the remote wipe facility, both critical for enterprise users. The crucial new feature for tech writers like me was the ability to grab a screenshot by pressing the power and home buttons together – a facility that Android phones lacked until very recently.

The next major release, iOS 3, arrived with the 3GS. Until then, everyone (me included) had mocked Apple for not providing copy-and-paste ability on its phones, but version 3 filled that lacuna.

Alongside many other tweaks came a major upgrade to the Safari browser, which elevated the iPhone to being the best handheld web-browsing machine available, at least for a while. iOS 3 also added video capture, much-improved SMS and support for turn-by-turn satnav (although only on more recent GPS-enabled hardware).

You’ll find Apple does this quite a lot, the excuse being that it wants to guarantee the ‘best possible user experience’

The next significant release was iOS 3.2, which was for the iPad and has never appeared on the iPhone (nor on the iPod Touch, whose OS releases run pretty well parallel to those for the phone).

Version 4 of iOS arrived with the iPhone 4, and was initially available as an update for iPhone and iPod Touch only – not the iPad.

Significantly, this was the first iPod Touch update that Apple provided for free. If you have an old iPhone or iPod, this is where you may come unstuck, since iOS 4 won’t run on the original versions of either, and even on the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod Touch its feature set is restricted.

You’ll find Apple does this quite a lot, the excuse being that it wants to guarantee the “best possible user experience” – detractors claim it’s to force you to upgrade your phone every few years, an accusation backed up by YouTube videos showing hacks of the new OS running just fine on older hardware.

Multitasking arrives

Multitasking finally arrived on the iPhone with iOS 4, although many users never realised (many still don’t) as it requires a double-press of the home key, which violates Apple’s usual high standard of UI intuitiveness.

An ability to create folders on the homescreen was also “easy once you know how”, but equally easy to overlook. The changes business users appreciated were support for multiple Exchange accounts and a single unified inbox.

Version 4.2 was the next significant release, providing unified support for the same version on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. To be honest, it didn’t bring many new features, mainly small things such as bug fixes and a couple of new fonts – nothing to get excited about for iPhone users, but for iPad users the first opportunity to bring their tablets up to iOS 4’s multitasking and improved email.

iOS 4.3 arrived with the iPad 2, and this version stranded a few more users by dropping support for the iPhone 3G and second-generation Touch. It brought AirPlay support for third-party apps, allowing them to stream video to other devices, and the iPhone version also included a personal Wi-Fi hotspot, although this was playing catch-up since other phones had already had this for some time.

iOS 5 was announced, along with the iPhone 4S, the day before Steve Jobs died. Once the bad news about Jobs had sunk in, commentators started announcing that the 4S was obviously released “for Steve”– but frankly, I find that hard to believe: given the tight-lipped nature of Apple’s corporate culture we’ll probably never know.

iOS 5 supports the same devices that 4.3 did but with a whole bunch of new features, including a unified notification centre that can be used instead of the previous pop-up type bubbles. iMessage is Apple’s answer to RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger, allowing instant messaging between iOS 5 devices across either 3G or Wi-Fi.

Newsstand enables users to subscribe to magazines to read on their phone or tablet, and works nicely. For the iPhone 4S only, iOS 5 also added support for Siri, Apple’s much-derided voice input facility. This release also provided online backup via Apple’s iCloud service, with 5MB of free space.

There are said to be more than 200 changes in iOS 5, but if you’re used to a previous version there’s little new to learn.
The last release of iOS, for now, is 5.1, which arrived with the “new iPad”, referred to as iPad 3 by everyone except Apple. Frankly it brings no major new features, and if you’re happy with iOS 5 you may as well stick with it.

Google phones (and tablets)

You probably already knew that each major revision of Google’s Android OS receives a confectionary-related codename, so version 1.5 is Cupcake, probably the oldest release you’re likely to encounter in the wild, although I haven’t seen any new device ship with it for a while.

The next update was version 1.6, Donut, which mainly provided better stability, but also introduced enhancements to search and camera applications, as well as a speech synthesiser.

You may still find version 1.6 shipping on some very low-cost phones (especially from no-name manufacturers), and even on a few ultra-cheap tablets, mainly of the “resistive screen” variety.

Version 2, or Eclair, finally brought Exchange email to Android, and so started to make it a viable platform for businesses. It also brought a much-improved UI to the OS, which didn’t prevent most handset manufacturers from continuing with their own UI overlays such as HTC’s Sense, Motorola’s Motoblur and Samsung’s TouchWiz. Eclair also included a greatly improved onscreen keyboard and numerous camera enhancements.

The next release, version 2.2, was called Froyo, which makes sense to Americans, but for the rest of us is short for (fro)zen (yo)ghurt. The main improvement was a speed boost, since version 2.2 ran far more efficiently than previous ones. The extra speed came not only from improved device drivers and memory optimisations, but also from a far more efficient JavaScript engine inside the web browser with just-in-time (JIT) compilation for apps.

Froyo also provided better ActiveSync facilities for Exchange integration, with features such as security policies and remote wiping, calendar sync and global address list lookup. The OS also received push notifications, which could be used by any app that employs Google’s Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) service.

Towards the end of 2010, Google released Android version 2.3 or Gingerbread. The main offering for device updaters was yet another revised UI, this time aimed at simplicity and rapid access to commonly used features.

Although the Gingerbread UI was really rather good, mainstream phone manufacturers continued to slather their own front-ends on top of it. Gingerbread also included support for recent hardware features such as bigger screens, gyroscopes, audio processors, front-facing cameras, NFC receivers and more – but of course, such enhancements are academic to anyone who’s upgrading an older handset lacking such features. With this release Google once again tweaked the virtual keyboard, although some people complain that they prefer the Froyo version. Now that Android had front-facing camera support, Gingerbread also naturally added video calling.

Honeycomb went off at a tangent because it was primarily aimed at tablets, rather than being solely a phone OS

Android version 3, aka Honeycomb, went off at a tangent because it was primarily aimed at tablets, rather than being solely a phone OS. That isn’t to say you won’t find pre-Honeycomb OSes on tablets – there are shedloads out there, and those sub-£100 junk tablets (don’t even think about it) often run Android versions as old as 1.6.

Google didn’t want tablets to run Android prior to version 3, and actively advised against it, but of course being open source meant that it couldn’t stop tablet manufacturers from doing it.

What it could – and did – do was restrict access to utilities such as the Android Market, Google Maps and Gmail to only those devices that have passed Google’s compatibility test suite. Such officially sanctioned tablets and handsets are called “Google Experience Devices” (although it isn’t a description most consumers will recognise). Because of this restriction we’ve seen no end of devices with third-party mail clients in place of Gmail and only access to various, grossly inferior app stores.

As Honeycomb was specifically designed for tablets, its UI was completely re-engineered to work better on a bigger screen. Google called this new UI “Holographic”, which is pure marketing rubbish – it may have a slight 3D feel to it in parts, but you can’t walk around behind it.

The extra screen space available permitted Google to add an Action bar to the top of the screen (a top bar for each app that displays context information, options, navigation and other buttons) and a System bar to the bottom of the screen, which displays soft navigation buttons, status and notifications. Honeycomb also adds tablet essentials, such as improved multitasking, multiple browser tabs and yet another redesigned virtual keyboard.

Much as Google didn’t really want pre-Honeycomb versions of Android on tablets, it also strenuously opposed companies putting Honeycomb onto their phones, to a point that it found various reasons and excuses not to release an open source option of version 3. Without this, it wasn’t possible for manufacturers to bypass Google and stick the code into unsanctioned devices.

Today’s trend towards ever-larger phones is blurring the borderline between phone and tablet

Today’s trend towards ever-larger phones – I’m often put in mind of that famous Dom Joly “I’m on the phone” sketch from Trigger Happy TV – is blurring the borderline between phone and tablet so much so that we now have both phones and tablets with 5in screens (see Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Dell’s Streak).

What’s clearly needed is one single version of Android that bridges the gap by running acceptably on both small- and large-screened devices, which is where the latest major release of Android comes in, version 4, otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich (or ICS). This builds on Honeycomb, but provides an environment that’s suitable for both phones and tablets.

Worth the upgrade?

So to answer James’ question as to whether he should upgrade his device, which sparked off this recap: Google has said that any device that shipped with Gingerbread should be capable of running ICS, so it’s an update path available to many Android phones currently in use.

Is it a worthwhile upgrade? I think it almost certainly is for most users, and that ICS is by far the best version of Android so far. It does require a bit more CPU grunt, so users of older phones might find it a little sluggish in places, but overall, and especially on a recent phone, it works really well.

Everything seems to have been tweaked, from animations and user feedback through to such basic things as the default system font, which is both smarter and more readable across devices of various screen sizes.

What’s particularly encouraging is to see a whole raft of accessibility enhancements in ICS that make Android phones and tablets far easier to use by blind or visually impaired users, an area where up until now iPhones and iPads have led the field – now Google seems to have overtaken Apple.

Just about every aspect of Android appears to have been tweaked, improved or completely rewritten for ICS, far too much for me to bore you with here.

I’ll just urge you to first check whether your device can run Android 4 at all, and then to do some research to see what people say about how well it performs on your hardware.

If everything checks out okay, then I’d seriously suggest you carry out the update, because ICS is a brilliant OS on both tablets and phones. Finally, and most importantly for journos like me, ICS finally brings a native screenshot facility to Android devices!