Smartphone users who invested in Huawei‘s first big product in the US can now breath a sigh of relief. After receiving no small amount of flak from their users, the Chinese OEM has “reassessed” their update strategy and have now announced that the gigantic Ascend Mate2 will indeed be updated to Android 5.0 after all. The only minor catch is that the update won’t take place until sometime within the first half of 2015.
Huawei dropped a bombshell last month when it announced that the Ascend Mate2 will not be receiving the latest Android version. Now, it’s certainly not unheard of for OEM’s to drop support for some of their devices along the way, but this smartphone hardly deserves that treatment. For one, it was just launched early this year, touted even to be Huawei’s great entry into the US, so it is hardly an aging device. For another, the phone launched with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and never even got an Android 4.4 KitKat update yet.
We can only presume that Huawei thought it had very valid reasons to block the update. They should, at least, be commended for being upfront about it instead of leaving their users hanging. But whatever reasons they might have had, the backlash they got made them reconsider their position and fortunately give in to their users’ admittedly very reasonable demands. So it’s official, the Ascend Mate2 will jump straight from Jelly Bean to Android 5.0 Lollipop, skipping KitKat in the process, in the first half of next year, which could very well mean until late June. Hopefully it will come earlier.
That said, Huawei might want to put the past behind it quickly. The Ascend Mate2 isn’t exactly dated, it isn’t exactly high end either. Especially compared to the new Ascend Mate7, which skipped a few version numbers before it went public last September. That one is pretty much the manufacturer’s flagship and is probably where the company wants to focus its resources on.
SOURCE: Huawei
