Yesterday, Chinese manufacturer Lenovo launched the K8 Note in India. It’s the first Lenovo smartphone to come with dual camera setup, and, is also the first Lenovo smartphone to run stock Android after the company announced that all of its future smartphones will be running the stock version of Android. While it’s a good decision, the company has now revealed list of its devices that won’t be getting the Android 7.0 Nougat update, some of which were launched last year, and that, is not a good decision.
Lenovo has updated its software support page which confirms that Android 7.0 Nougat update won’t be rolled out to all of its devices in its PHAB lineup. This includes the original PHAB, the PHAB Plus, PHAB2, PHAB2 Plus and PHAB2 Pro. The last three devices were launched just last year in June, and it’s bad that Lenovo is not upgrading them to Nougat.
Speaking of the PHAB2 Pro, it was the first smartphone that came with support for Tango, Google’s platform for Augmented Reality (AR). As Lenovo isn’t going to roll out further update, the original PHAB and PHAB Plus will remain on Android 5.0 Lollipop whereas the PHAB2, PHAB2 Plus and PHAB2 Pro will be on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Apart from the PHAB series, the TAB3 7 Essential and TAB3 10 Business tablets, which also were launched last year, will remain on Android Lollipop and Marshmallow respectively and won’t get the Nougat update.
Well, it’s time for Google to come up with a way to ensure that OEMs roll-out the latest software updates for their devices for at least one and a half year from the launch. It’s reasons like these that Android Nougat is still only on 13.5% of devices after around a year from its release.
By the way, what are your thoughts on Lenovo’s decision to stop software support for its devices that were launched just last year?
