I didn’t react, and don’t want to feverishly debate this, all the more than historically my family has been using macintoshes, that had (at the time) a very long life duration wrt PCs, with multiple large system updates being ‘bearable’ by the same old hardware.
But I am a bit sceptical on this concerning Android, because of the tablet environment.
Android is not only for phones. And the current picture for the tablets is very telling IMHO: there is a huge, and to me fatal, move from laptops to tablets.
Which means, very ambitious apps arriving on Android.
And here I don’t mean just a printing capacity for instance.
The german guys in Softmaker just released a prototype version of an openoffice/word/excel/powerpoint complete suite, exhaustive to the tiniest detail, that just ports the whole thing onto tablets, immediately useable -as long as the tablet is powerful enough of course.
Photomate, similarly, proposes a photo processing that starts with raw photos and incorporate extremely ambitious tunings like color-per-color light intensity curves fitting: with this kind of tool 90% of the professional photographers can just trash Photoshop. Again, as long as the tablet is powerful enough.
Samsung has been incorporating handwritting recognition in phones and tablets for a couple of years now, and for having seen my awful, french, unseparated script being totally recognized with zero error straight at the first attempt (compared to the pathetic results of all previous attempts in the past -remember Apple’s Newton?), I can say here again, as long as the tablet is powerful enough… plenty of things are to come.
This, to me, means the next versions of Android will be more ambitious, would it be just to follow: incorporating more efficient filesystems, printers etc. and these Androids will run on extremely more powerful tablets.
Because of this I’m almost sure they won’t be downward-compatible. This won’t be because of phones, but because of tablets.
Now, guess what. Maybe the next Fair phone will be… a tablet, after all
(fair and root? indeed it’d be an impulse buy for me…)