Upgrades or not
by Volker Weber
This is a week of upgrades or updates. Sonos is going to release 6.0 which will bring you TruePlay Tuning. That is a great upgrade, since many of your speakers will sound way better. You can test this easily. Put a speaker in a cardboard box and then tune it. It's going to sound as if you had taken it out of the box. But it's not only an upgrade. Sonos is going to drop support for Audible. I don't know the technical details, but it appears, Audible and Sonos have moved on. You can hold on to the old version for a while, but eventually you will have to move on as well.
There is also going to be an upgrade to the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro (1380L) this week, or so I hear. Apparently the upgrade to Android 5.0 has been rolled out to some 1380F already, that's the model without 3G. This particular device is now one year old. It has received numerous fixes and upgrades, but never to a new Android version. Android 5.0 is now also one year old, give or take a few months. It has been superseded by 5.1 and now 6.0.
This bothers me a bit. I mean, the Yoga is still working well, it's stable, it does what it is supposed to to. And there are quite a lot of people out there, who do not care. At all. They never upgrade, they are actually very happy if nothing changes at all. I never really thought about that. Maybe we are all too preoccupied with the latest and greatest.
I think it bothers me because I see Lenovo as a name brand and not some Chinese manufacturer that builds cheap Android slates and then forgets about them. I expect them to stand by their products and keep on improving them. Maybe not like Sonos, who has been upgrading their products for a decade. But at least for more than a year, and in a timely fashion. As you can see in the table above, the original Tablet 10 and Tablet 8 were upgraded once from Jelly Bean to Kitkat. The Tablet 2 generation were upgraded once from Kitkat to Lollipop, or are going to be upgraded.
When the third generation comes in this week, I expect the same. Maybe an upgrade to Marshmallow, sometimes next year. But beyond that? I am not holding my breath.
Comments
Re: Audible and Sonos.
I understood it differently (or want to understand it differently?).
Before Audible was only supported in a brain dead and inconvenient way, like podcasts for example. You had to manually manage files and manually sync your listening position across devices. Not even me, listening a lot to audio books, could be bothered with that. In face of so much inconvenience I prefer to put up with the speakers in my phone.
Now Audible and Sonos have moved on to streaming and I would assume then also syncing. However they are not working at the same pace. So we have to wait.
So they are taking away something broken by design, but if we wait we may get something useful. That would have been great three years ago. But better late than ever.
Hopefully I will some day be able to just stream from my phone to Sonos. Like with cars, I also would like those manufacturers to provide an interface to the outside world and leave the innovation in apps to the guys who have a horse in the race and are not spectators only.
Next year will be great year for Sonos software. That's all I can say.
