It's the same across the board with every manufacturer. Bought a Lumia 900? Sucker. Not moving up to W8, are you?
Its not the same though, Apple have a stellar reputation for IOS upgrades applying to older iPhones.
There may be a feature or two missing across models, but in the main, every new release of IOS is applicable to every old iPhone.
Whereas, if you look at Android, though a combination of hardware vendors losing interest in discontinued models (I guess?) and carriers not caring (I guess) , once you have taken delivery of your shiny new Android Phablet you can be pretty much guaranteed (at least on past behavior) that beyond the next release of Android (if you are lucky), that's it as far as it supporting newer OS's.
So say in two years time, when the Galaxy V comes out with Android 5 or 6 (or whatever), you can bet that the odds of a GIII supporting that are pretty much zero, so your phone is pretty much obsoleted (and has lost value if you are trying to sell it). Meanwhile, someone with an iPhone 4s and maybe a 4 will likely be running IOS 8, so they are getting much better longevity and value, they can still download the latest apps made for some feature in IOS 7 or 8, whilst the person that writes code for Android needs to be aware what release its for. Write for the latest and greatest and odds are its not going to work on 90% or more of Androids out there, write for the 90% (or some fragment of, say the 20% on 2.1, the 5% on 3, the 30% on 4.0, the 9% on 4.1 etc) and it wont work on the others Much simpler life as an IOS developer.
This is why I think it was such a catastrophic error for Nokia to obsolete their Lumias within a few weeks of release with the "no WP8" announcement, it looks as if Softy/Nokia is going to pull the exact same stunt, presumably to try to incent (force)you to buy another phone but they will just fragment the infrastructure and make people less eager to buy. |
