HTC Desire owners who subscribed to UK mobile service provider O2 are finding themselves with a useless phone after upgrading to Android 2.2.
This is the latest part of the never-ending story that has become the Android 2.2 upgrade saga. With a bevy of phones waiting to be upgraded and mobile companies going slowly through them, one at a time, the process of updating to Android 2.2 has already taken multiple months and will take several more.
For the most part, though, upgrades have gone off without a hitch. There was a slight problem in the US when the HTC Evo 4G update file was apparently released too early. No widespread issues came about as a result of that, however.
In the UK, it’s a different story. The HTC Desire, which was just recently released in the US, is not exactly living up to its name after O2 rolled out the Android 2.2 upgrade a couple days ago.
Immediately after installing the update, some users found their phones completely bricked. They became 100% unusable. Of those whose phones still work, there are other problems, like frequent software crashes. O2’s forums have exploded with reports from users expressing frustration.
As a result, the UK mobile provider has pulled the update and it’s likely to take weeks before it will be made available again, and a patch released to those who already upgraded. Users with a bricked phone will need to go to an authorized service center or send in their phone to get it fixed.
It highlights the biggest problem with Android, which is the fact that it spans so many different devices and mobile service providers. It’s very difficult to meet so many different standards simultaneously.
Google’s plan with the next-generation version of Android, version 3.0, is to have much stricter guidelines for hardware makers to adhere to, but that doesn’t do anything to shake the very real concerns that current Android users have. It doesn’t seem to be a huge problem, though, as Android continues to chip away at the market share of every single other mobile platform.
