Last year's tech is good enough for Sprint's new push-to-talk Android phone
Sprint Nextel on Monday announced it will be replacing the year-old Motorola i1 in its product lineup with the Motorola Titanium, the second rugged Android phone to support the 800/900 MHz iDEN network protocol and the Nextel Direct Connect push to talk service.
Motorola Titanium includes a portrait QWERTY keyboard, 3.1" touchscreen display in a ruggedized design meeting Military Specification 810G (MIL-STD-810G) for environmental stress resistance to dust, shock, air pressure, temperature and sunshine. It has a 5 megapixel LED flash camera, stereo bluetooth, 802.11b/g, AGPS, and a micro USB port.
Unfortunately, Motorola does not disclose the device's processor speed, and only says it supports "up to 200MB" of RAM. A major strike against the Motorola Titanium is that it will ship with Android 2.1 (Eclair,) an already outdated version of Google's Android operating system.
It would appear that equipping an Android phone with push-to-talk capability or iDEN support seriously limits the phone's upgradeability. The Motorola i1 launched last year with Android 1.5, which was already long in the tooth by the time it hit the market, and it was never even scheduled for upgrade.
So i1 users are still using Android 1.5, making them one of the smallest segments of the Android user community today.
17.5% of Android users are still running Eclair, but the vast majority (59.4%) are running its successor, FroYo. When Motorola and Sprint launch the TItanium on July 24th for $149.99, it will fall in at the trailing end of Android innovations.
Even Sprint's Nextel iDEN network, technically a "1G" network, only has about two more years ahead of it before it's gone. At the end of 2010, the network operator said it will begin phasing out its iDEN cell sites in 2013 so it can use the 900MHz band for its higher-traffic data networks. Motorola's iDEN business, meanwhile, was the only wireless infrastructure business it couldn't sell to Nokia-Siemens Networks last year.