You can’t blame everything on the manufacturers. There’s a big issue here in that manufactures need to differentiate their products from their competitors. Otherwise, they might as well just be OEMs (and be paid like one). Google chose a strategy to grab as much market share as quickly as possible even if they knew it would lead to fragmentation. For that, they are to blame.

For manufacturers, they need to make a choice of if it’s worth the time and resources to release a compatible update that doesn’t hurt the user experience. My guess is that they won’t put it high on their priorities because Android isn’t their platform and they aren’t guaranteed high volumes for producing an Android phone. Remember, outside of the Nexus One, every Android phone on the market is selling below manufacturing costs and depending on carrier subsidies to make a profit. (I would also bet the they aren’t getting the high subsidies that the iPhone commands).

But fragmentation isn’t the biggest problem I see for Android. That would be how quickly Android be able to keep up with the evolution of the iPhone. iPhone 4.0 promises to be to a major upgrade and with Apple’s integrated hardware and software structure, they will be able to push new product features out much faster than Android. Any innovations will surely be accompanied with a slew of patents that Android will have to figure out how to work around. Of course that’s just speculation. We’ll see in June.

Lastly. For tech heads, the idea of jail breaking your phone to get updates may seem easy, but for a mass market appeal, these issues must be handled for a user. Until this issue is solved, I don’t see Android gaining mass adoption.

Carriers may be irritated at having to OTA or answer support questions, but who cares??? HTC already has Sense optimized for 2.1, so now Motorola (Blur), Sony (Xperia series) and Samsung (Behold II) have to get off their butts and get their custom builds ready as well. They never should have messed with Android in the first place. They should have differentiated with what they were good at – HARDWARE, and left the OS to Google. If they wanted to add some of their custom crap, make an app and preload it or have it available on the Android Market.

If you have an out of date computer running MacOS X (pre-Tiger), it’s practically useless. You can’t hardly download any versions of applications that run on your computer.

On the other hand, Windows 2000 is STILL able to run many modern applications.

I’m not saying Windows 2000 is my operating system of choice (I use MacOS X), but I think the fragmentation issue is a non-issue.

Phone customers almost always upgrade their phones when their current plan expires anyway. So what really needs to happen is all the carriers need to adopt ONE YEAR data plans that will sync with the hardware upgrades mo betta.

I would not waste any resources on the bottom feeders. Remember most people that stick with old phone OS tend to stay well behind the curve anyhow so you will never bring this type of slag to the forefront of the pack.

Android needs to stay in pack leader mode. The weaker dogs need to be brushed aside. These are “smart phones” not Nokia junk feature phone boys.

A 6 month hardware & software upgrade path needs to be firmly embedding into the cerebral cortex of the buying public. If your cranium is too dense to accommodate this rapid update cycle then you are not the type of purchaser The Google needs to fatten their R&D budget to keep ahead in the mobile space race.

DO NOT WASTE TIME AND RESOURCES DE-FRAGGING FOR OLD HARDWARE.

‘NUFF SAID before my head explodes.

And, I’ll be the one to say it – please proofread what you write.