no (official) Jelly Bean on the ThinkPad slate?

[sobrado]

As some of you know, I am a frequent collaborator on these forums trying both to help other users and get help when I have issues with my ThinkPad slate. I usually defend Lenovo position on these forums too, as I feel this company is being under attack from some users sometimes without real facts supporting their rage against this company. However, this time I am worried about some comments I read on this forum as a consequence of a post from a Lenovo employee about the future of the slate or, to be more precise, the plans about the operating system running on it.

Is it true there are no plans to make Jelly Bean officially available on the slate? Why? Is it just because there are some whiners on this forum posting messages full of rage against the company behind this product or it was a carefully considered decision?

I am sorry if my words sound too hard, but this one is a fundamental issue on the ThinkPad slate and want to express my opinion in a direct way.

Are the plans of Lenovo leaving customers (either corporations or individual users) without support in less than a year after releasing this device? What about corporations that had adquired hundreds, perhaps thousands, of devices and now will get no support, no software updates. What about the stability issues that remain on the tablet operating system (obviously more stable than before, but far from being perfect yet)? What about the software bugs and security holes? Is the official answer "we do not care, it is not our problem."?

I would expect having updates to Android 4.x and we have not yet even moved to the most updated release in the 4.0.x series (and it seems, from what I read, that we possibly will never go to 4.0.4).

Lenovo, this one is a business slate, right? It means having a business-class support, at least at the updates level, not only a business-class price. Will you leave business that adquired this device with the only choice of hacking their own devices to install an operating system developed by some clever users on their free time?

I was certainly not expecting this lack of support, at least not so early.

[p600]

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What about corporations that had adquired hundreds, perhaps thousands, of devices and now will get no support, no software updates. What about the stability issues that remain on the tablet operating system (obviously more stable than before, but far from being perfect yet)? What about the software bugs and security holes? 

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If such corporations exist, and they demand the update, we may see it. I doubt Lenovo has an "official" answer now, but I wouldn't count on it, tbh.

In 2013 (when such update may show up, given the previous history) TPT will be so slow and outdated, not many would care anyway. Hopefully, the new Thinkpad tablet, running Windows 8, will be better.

Plus, the days of Android tablets priced higher than laptops are officially over, with $200 Nexus 7. 

[yahoowizard]

Jelly Bean has only been announced for now, and most tablet manufacturers haven't even stated anything yet. This is way too early for Lenovo to make any comments, as they themselves have not decided what to do or any of that. If they announce it early, it might be around January or February of next year.

As for whether or not we should get it, I was surprised/happy enough to get ICS, and upon buying it, they didn't guarantee we'd get any updates. Optimally, we'd like them to work to get every OS upgrade until Vanilla or w/e comes at V, but after selling the tablet, working on giving us the upgrades, such as ICS, give them no profit and only uses up their time and money, which is why most phone/tablet manufacturers only support their phones/tablets for a year at max.

All things aside, the developer community is pretty good overall and hopefully, we'll be able to get JellyBean through other means. We were able to get ICS about two months before the official release, which was good, and yeah, overall, it's just wayyyy too early now to even be discussing any of this.

[ron2k_1]

Yep, I have a print-screen bitmap image of this post:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-slate-tablets/Android-4-1-jelly-bean-to-be-announced-tonight/m-...

Just in case he pulls it later on or it is slightly modified....

But I'm giving Lenovo the benefit of the doubt that what that staffer said was just as a result of frustration from all presumption we were giving in the earlier posts of that thread.  We'll see if Lenovo issues anything official as a result of that comment.

Ron

[someotherguy]

I'm confused how "no upgrade to Jellybean" equates to "lack of support" or "no more updates".  It seems like you have made those conclusions on your own.  Nothing I have posted has suggested that TPT is unsupported, or that there aren't going to be more updates to fix issues that customers report to us.  If that is how you have interpreted something that I have written, then you have made a mistake.

[ameridian]

IIRC, Lenovo skipped Android 3.2 and went from 3.1 to 4.0. Based on the time it took, it's quite possible that 5.0 or whatever will be out before we see another O/S upgrade from Lenovo, if any. So not seeing 4.1 on the TPT is more than likely IMO.

BTW, isn't 4.0 --> 4.1 considered a minor upgrade using standard versioning nomenclature? If so, why does Google have to give it some other dumba$$ sweet name and have everyone riled up as though on a kid's sugar high? Wasn't 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 all HC?

[vijil]

4.1 to me at least looks like a significant upgrade, mostly due to project butter but also some interface tweaks.

I don't mind not getting it though. I'll only be buying nexus branded android products from now on. The custom images manufacturers put on their devices are always badly thought out crapware (with the possible exception of sony and LG) so there's really no reason to buy them especially when it puts you 6 months behind the times in terms of updates.

I just wish the nexus 7 had stylus support.

[ameridian]

4.1 to me at least looks like a significant upgrade, mostly due to project butter but also some interface tweaks.

I was just going by the major.minor.patch (or something similar) versioning convention. The whole thing reeks of "Apple style" marketing IMO.

[pghFL]

"The whole thing reeks of "Apple style" marketing IMO."

Too true, ameridan.

[sobrado]

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someotherguy wrote:

I'm confused how "no upgrade to Jellybean" equates to "lack of support" or "no more updates".  It seems like you have made those conclusions on your own.  Nothing I have posted has suggested that TPT is unsupported, or that there aren't going to be more updates to fix issues that customers report to us.  If that is how you have interpreted something that I have written, then you have made a mistake.

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So there will be an update to release 4.0.4?  Are the stability and performance improvements on this release on Lenovo's support roadmap or not? I think that it is reasonable asking for, at least, fixes to ICS!

It is a shame that Google has given a different name to Android 4.1, a shame, really.  From wikipedia:

On 27 June 2012 at Google I/O, Google announced the next Android version, 4.1 Jelly Bean. It is an incremental update with the main focus of improving the user interface, both in terms of functionality and performance, the latter involving "Project Butter" which uses touch anticipation, triple buffering, extended vsync timing and a fixed frame rate of 60fps to create a fluid and "buttery" smooth UI.

An incremental update does not sound like a new operating system version. It is a shame on Google that they have renamed it for marketing purposes, really. But, well, it is too late to fix this mistake.