Iconia A500, the 10.1 inch tablet from Acer, will get the much awaited Android Honeycomb 3.1 upgrade by the end of this month or by early next month.
“We will be releasing the upgrade by the end of July, which is much later than its international debut date which starts from today,” said a spokesperson of Acer India to ‘The Mobile Indian’.
The delay, the spokesperson added, is due to “the unavailability of OTA (over the air) upgrades in India as many of the service providers here in India do not support it.”
Over the air updates allow devices such as tablets and smartphones to updates directly from the service provider without having to connect the handset to a WiFi network.
The Android Honeycomb 3.1 upgrade includes standard enhancements brought to the original version 3.0 Honeycomb, including a USB port that can be used to plug USB 2.0 devices such as mice, keyboards and even games console controllers to the tablet.
The update will allow users to resize their homepage widgets to suit their need in terms of the layout and the appearance. Also included in Android 3.1 is a robust application switching and multi tasking mechanism that enables more productivity compared to the previous version.
Not just Acer but many other similar device manufacturers are suffering because of the unavailability of OTA upgrades in India. The delay in upgrade times could be considerably lessened if OTA upgrades were possible in India.