Christy Wyatt, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Motorola’s Enterprise Business Unit, thinks that harware is key when it comes to updating phones to the latest iteration of Android. “Don’t blame manufacturers’ software customizations for holding up mobile phone upgrades to the new version of Google’s mobile operating system, Android 4.0“, she said.

According to the executive, hardware is the key to the mystery; “when Google does a release of the software … they do a version of the software for whatever phone they just shipped. The rest of the ecosystem doesn’t see it until you see it. Hardware is by far the long pole in the tent, with multiple chipsets and multiple radio bands for multiple countries. It’s a big machine to churn“.

Christy Wyatt probably refers to the phenomenon Eric Schmidt calls “device differentiation”; we could add freedom of choice, beauty of diversity and most definitely not fragmentation.

The process is described as being a rather complicated one: first comes hardware support followed by custom software from OEMs and then carrier certification. This can take a rather long time, despite the fact that users want updates sooner. “More than once we’ve come out as the fastest to get to market with an upgrade“, Wyatt added, despite the fact that Sony for instance supports less chipsets and is still to push out promised updates.

Despite the fact that Windows Phone uses a single chipset, thus making updates easier, Motorola has no plans to support it; the company is in for the long run with Android, especially now that it has been acquired by Google.

As far as Ice Cream Sandwich is concerned, Motorola is looking forward to the latest iteration of Android; it closes the gap between the phone and the tablet ecosystems “by bringing these UIs together, you solve the experience gaps“. Read the entire interview at the source link below.

Source: PCMag

Via: Electronista