Wow, Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy S24 family of flagship Android devices is truly impressive. There’s so much to talk about, but we’ll focus on the bigger-picture significance of these new Galaxy gadgets.
While Samsung’s latest Galaxy models have a lot of great features, the software inside our devices is more important than ever. Samsung is introducing a lot of fresh AI goodies and raising the stakes on the all-around experience it’s serving up to fans of its heavily opinionated Android approach.
But let’s not get into the nitty-gritty details here. Instead, let’s talk about the bigger-picture significance of what these new Galaxy gadgets represent for the greater Android ecosystem and the broader mobile industry.
And that all comes down to one two-syllabled number.
Samsung is promising seven years of software support for anyone who buys its Galaxy S24 devices. That’s a massive change from the past, where the standard expected window for an Android device to receive operating system updates was a mere 18 months. But in 2014, that was the norm. It wasn’t until a certain riled-up Android writer started chanting endlessly about the absurdity of that standard that one Android device-maker rose to the challenge and said “all right” — it’d start supporting its phones for a full two years after their release.
That company wasn’t Google, either. It was HTC — a one-time pillar of the Android hardware ecosystem that’s mostly faded into obscurity today. Back then, though, HTC was one of the biggest forces across the Android platform. And you know what happened once it announced it’d start supporting its devices for that then-unheard-of two-year period? Yes, indeedly: Other phone-makers followed suit.
2024-01-22 21:00:04
Source from www.computerworld.com