Month: June 2014

After reading numerous articles, tweets, blog posts praising, condemning, or questioning Amazon’s Fire Phone’s existence, I’ve decided that I am NOT going to buy Jeff Bezos spectacular device (yes, this iLover thinks the Fire Phone is awesome!). Ironically though I’m not buying Fire Phone for different reasons than what what most geeks are probably arguing about (i.e. yesteryear’s screen resolution or the lack of apps). A Mutated Jelly Bean‽ After searching the Twitterverse for micro eons I had a close encounter with @MBCrump, who enlightened me that the OS powering Amazon’s greatest creation is in fact based upon a semi-outdated Android OS formally known as Jelly Bean. As Engadget explains: “The software is Fire OS 3.5, which is a forked version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (or the AOSP, at least). However, Williams insists that there’s very little relation between the two, primarily because Amazon has made so many adjustments of its own that it has plenty of different features and new user interface elements on top.” Although I’m sure Amazon will solve any security issues that pop up, app developers may opt to focus their attention upon the latest & greatest Android OS first, before making their app “backwards compatible” for Jelly Bean (aka Android 4.2). Unless startups can raise an army of clones to release updates simultaneously upon 3.5 mobile OS’s (iOS, Android, Windows Phone & Fire...