The Galaxy S3 will miss out on Lollipop.
Samsung today delivered the news all Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S3 owners have been dreading: the South Korean company will not be updating these devices to Android 5.0 Lollipop. That means both handsets will remain on KitKat without the help of unofficial, third-party ROMs.
Who says Android makers don’t support old devices? Those still clinging onto Samsung’s near 3-year-old Galaxy Note II will be getting an Android 5.0 Lollipop update, the company has confirmed, but they’re likely going to have to wait a long time for it.
A leaked internal document has surfaced on the internet disclosing that Samsung is in the process of internally testing the new, unannounced Android 4.4.3 update on both the Snapdragon and Exynos-powered variants of the Galaxy S5, together with the LTE-A edition of the Galaxy S4.
Samsung recently upset a lot of international Galaxy S3 (GT-I9300) owners when it told them they weren’t getting an Android 4.4 KitKat upgrade because their handset “does not allow them to effectively support the platform upgrade.” The South Korean claimed that only 1GB of RAM wasn’t enough to run KitKat’s latest features smoothly. But that may not be true.
When Samsung confirmed it was giving up on KitKat for a large number of Galaxy S3s, the development community decided it was time to take matters into their own hands. Using a Galaxy Note II KitKat ROM, one develoepr has been able to create an almost perfect Galaxy S3 port.
Samsung’s new Galaxy Gear lineup is already compatible with a whole bunch of existing devices, the South Korean company revealed this week. Including the new Galaxy S5, 12 smartphones and 8 tablets work with the new wearables right out of the box.
