O2 Upgrades Dell Streak To Android 2.1

O2 will swap the older Android OS 1.6 found on the Dell Streak Tablet smartphone for the newer Android OS 2.1 by next month but did not give any reason why it did not press ahead to upgrade to Android OS 2.2 instead.

A spokesperson for the company told ZDNet UK that “O2’s software testing team is currently working on bringing Android 2.1 Éclair to our Dell Streak customers as soon as possible. We expect this to be available in September and will update our customers once the new software is available”.

Android 2.1 OS brings a number of improvements to version 1.6 like 720p HD recording, better virtual keyboard, Live wall papers, Pinch-to-zoom maps and much more. Engadget has a full preview of the update here.

Still, this doesn’t not square up with Dell’s official stance on Android and the Streak which points to the company sticking with version 1.6 for a foreseeable future while working on “next-gen Android platform”, most possibly Froyo.

This brings up a number of interesting questions; why wouldn’t O2 go for OS 2.1 instead of OS 2.2 bearing in mind that the latter introduces one supremely important feature, Flash compatibility. Then there’s also the fact that Android OS 3.0 (Gingerbread) is already schedule to go live towards the end of the year.

Add in the fact that it might prove problematic to handle three versions of Android concurrently and you start to wonder whether it wouldn’t have made more sense for O2/Dell to swap v1.6 for v3.0 instead.

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By | 2010-08-09T11:05:56+00:00 August 9th, 2010|Android Related, Just the Tablets|0 Comments

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