Here are some bad news for anyone who’s using one of Kenya’s most affordable smartphones rocking stock Android at the time when it launched: the Nokia 2.
Early in the week when HMD Global made public its Android Pie update roadmap for all its 2017 and 2018 smartphones, a notable omission was the Nokia 2. While we didn’t know the reasons why the device didn’t make the cut but speculated that it could be down to its limiting hardware, we now know why.
Even worse, we can confirm what everyone feared: the Nokia 2 is never getting Android Pie.
Yeah, that’s kinda sad but, according to HMD Global’s Chief Product Officer Juho Sarvikas, the company has done all that it could, including reaching out to partners like Qualcomm, the maker of the Snapdragon 212 processor that powers it, and Google, the platform custodians, to save the ship from sinking.
Turns out, just like we suspected, it is the Nokia 2’s entry-level specs that have come back to bite it. The device, despite winning our respect with its mammoth battery, has only 1 gigabyte of memory and, as we know about how resource-hungry our favourite mobile platform can be, that’s nowhere near being enough.
Sure, today, there’s the Go editions of newer Android versions that are developed with such devices in mind but Android Go didn’t exist when the Nokia 2 was entering the market and, as a result, not much can be done to salvage the situation. Yeah, it’s impossible to move a device that’s running standard Android builds to the Go platform so that’s that. If anything, HMD Global has been stuck trying to get Android Oreo to the device, what is Pie?
While Sarvikas makes no mention of Android Pie, given that they are struggling to get the previous version of Android, Oreo, to the device and even advising their customers to stay on Nougat for a consistent and more assured performance, what are the odds that there’s a slice of Pie on the table? We’ve filled in all the blanks by ourselves and, should things change, we’ll gladly eat our slice of humble pie.
