Can New Android Software Unify Android Devices?

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A new wave of smartphones and tablets will be introduced this year with “Ice Cream Sandwich,” the latest version of Google’s Android software. The mobile operating system has been expanded to run on both smartphones and tablets, but it remains unclear how it will fix the problem that plagues Android at its core: fragmentation.

Manufacturers of Android phones and the carriers decide which version of Android goes on their phones and tablets, and as a result, many different devices are not running the same version of Android. For businesses that make apps, that often means they have to make multiple versions of the same app to work on different devices. For customers, the end result is that some Android devices are compatible with certain apps, while others are not. Hence the term fragmentation — a splintered experience as opposed to a tidy software ecosystem, like Apple’s iOS. Ice Cream Sandwich bridges the gap between Android tablets and smartphones; now software makers can write apps that scale easily to both types of products. Nvidia, the chipmaker whose Tegra processor is found in the Asus Transformer, which runs Ice Cream Sandwich, thinks this solves fragmentation.


Can New Android Software Unify Android Devices?