HTC has confirmed that one of their somewhat recent handsets, the HTC One S, will stop receiving updates. The One S has been in the market for about 15 months.
The HTC One S and its big brother, the One X, were the company’s last generation flagship devices, launching with impressive specs at the time, great screens, and awesome photo/video performance. The S was a mid-level device aimed at folks that wanted quality on a budget.
However, the press release issued by HTC recently, clearly states the One S is now officially stuck on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean even though the company had previously promised to keep publishing updates. The full press release reads:
We can confirm that the HTC One S will not receive further Android OS updates and will remain on the current version of Android and HTC Sense. We realize this news will be met with disappointment by some, but our customers should feel confident that we have designed the HTC One S to be optimized with our amazing camera and audio experiences.
In other words, users won’t have access to any of the most recent features of Android and won’t be getting HTC’s new BlinkFeed and Zoe features either. And in light of recent developments they may even be at higher risk of having malware on their phones.
This is no doubt a disappointment to the few loyal customers that HTC still has, and will undoubtedly cause some customers to think twice before buying a new handset from the Taiwanese company. Not to mention the fact that this also makes a strong case for only buying Nexus, or pure Android editions of smartphones that get regular updates directly from Google.
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