It’s coming to that time of year when manufacturers are looking to sell more units than any other quarter – the Golden Quarter is upon us. Acer is one manufacturer that mostly ships and sells tablets so naturally they’d want people to go out and buy a brand new Iconia tab as opposed to either keeping their old one or just picking one up in a sale. However, Acer aren’t just making the new tablets a more attractive option they’re flat-out abandoning their previous generation. Iconia Tabs A100, A200 and the original A500 aren’t going to get updated to Jelly Bean.
Whilst there’s been no official word on this, netbookitalia have heard from a UK representative that the “old” models won’t be getting an update to Jelly Bean. Whilst this is hardly surprising – it’s something a lot of manufacturers do to keep new devices in the limelight – it’s something we’d rather not see. I, myself, used to own an A100 and I was happy that I got the update to Ice Cream Sandwich but as far as Acer’s support to the Android community goes it’s really quite poor. I don’t expect all manufacturers to unlock their bootloaders but Acer couldn’t even be bothered to release kernel source in a timely manner.
All this can’t mean a good reputation for the company, especially considering the A200 hasn’t been around as long as the A500 or A100 has. However, I can’t point the finger solely at Acer, as I’m sure updates to Tegra 2 packing devices has a lot more to do with Nvidia then we know. After all, how many devices packing the Tegra 2 chip have an official update to Jelly Bean? Even in the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (with Tegra 2) was left off of Samsung’s update list.