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Well isn’t this quite unfortunate. NVIDIA responded to a question from a developer asking if porting Android 3.0 to a Harmony-based Tegra 2 tablet would be possible and the answer ticked off many-a coder: no. Instead, developers are urged to adopt the newer Ventana platform that will be found in newer devices such as the XOOM, Galaxy Tab, and G-Slate – all of which are running Android 3.0. (Some notable Harmony tablets include the Notion Ink Adam, the Advent Vega, the Viewsonic ViewPad 7, the Toshiba Folio 100 and the Viewsonic gTablet.
These devices run Android 2.2 or earlier and may never, ever see Honeycomb. (Or even Gingerbread, for that matter.) And the OEMs of said products aren’t to blame – how could they know that official support for a chipset they adopted would be dropped less than a year after its inception? Unless NVIDIA suddenly decides to release some drivers after the clear decision, your best bet is to sell off what you currently have and get a tablet with Android 3.0 preinstalled. [NVIDIA, Thanks SDW!]
Feel sorry for all thouse people who bought the Adam.
They knew that they were taking a big risk with Notion Ink.
That was my first thought. There was a lot of promise in that thing.
From Notion Ink blog (some time ago…):
“Harmony and Ventana are two Tegra platforms and in September we made few hardware changes to make Adam Ventana compatible. That was done cos we sensed only Ventana devices will be able to run Honeycomb and we were right.”
;-)
Adam 2!
So much for my G-Tab
yeah it’s viewsonic and toshiba that I feel sorry for.
It’s my wife I feel sorry for. Her G-Tab hasn’t even arrived yet and it looks like CM7 is the last OS it’ll get.
Still looking for her G-Tab, eh? ;) lol
Quite the opposite. I know exactly where it is. It’s just not HERE. :-)
Wow. Now I REALLY have no interest in tablets.
I don’t get it…I don’t know what harmony is.
All I need to know is, does this mean I need to reconsider the Bionic or will that phone be unaffected by this news?
This brings into question how much support will the current platform get? If Nvidia keeps up this policy where they drop driver support within a year of release thats a really really bad move.
Lets all stick together on this and let NVIDIA know they are douches… Keep checking the below post as the Admin intends to release some contact info or something.
http://notioninkhacks.com/index.php/2011/04/12/huge-problem-on-the-honeycomb-front/
What’s surprising is that nvidia has driver support for really old geforce cards
Another reason to move to ipad, at least they support their devices, even the oldest ones
I fully expected an ignorant comment from the Apple drones. Your comparison makes no sense. It’s not the tablet makers who aren’t making the drivers, but Nvidia. Reading comprehension is a wonderful thing when you learn to use it.
I am no apple fan boy, but it doesn’t matter “why” the tablet isn’t supported after such a short life. It’s that the tablet “isn’t supported after such a short life”.
I guess that’s what people get for not buying top of the line
Lol it was when they bought it.
Yea I know but I’m just kidding lucky I got a xoom tho feel bad for the people who got Tue other kind of tablets they all were expecting honeycomb not anymore I guess
Hmm… if I was a tablet manufacturer I think I would drop NVIDA as supplier, they are bad for business.
and for a lot of other reasons
Isn’t this most likely due to Google’s recently announced standardization of Android tablets? I recall reading that they were working with Nvidia and others on standardizing a chipset. And aren’t the OEM’s a bit to blame considering Google specifically told them that versions of Android earlier than Honeycomb WERE NOT tablet optimized and shouldn’t be undertaken?
This is something I’ve been pointing out for a while and usually Android fans respond with “just root” and I get accused of being a fan of that fruity company–have never purchased a single product from them.
The point is, none of the hardware manufacturers are stating how long they will support the OS for their hardware. Their just throwing out new hardware. This wasn’t such an issue when it was only phones–the hardware was increasing fast enough where everyone would get a new device at least in two years. Now the hardware is reaching a point where it will last for some time, but I have yet to see anything from any OEM stating how long they will support Android for their devices–this includes SoC manufacturers.
At least give us some options–tell us one year or two years then charge for an upgrade or something. Though it seems like they more than likely will go the route of just dropping support thus to get the next version you will need to buy a new device. That will make Apple’s upgrade path look almost reasonable and make MS look great.
People who tell you stuff like that are just fanboys, Android has them, Apple has them, in the end they’re all idiots.
Well in another chain of thoughts, OEM have been warned before that android 2.x was not made for tablet but decided to proceed anyway… So if their hardware is not compatible with the tablet version of android, it kind of their fault for not listening.
They can stick with CM7 tablet tweaks…
Very good point.
Just to point out, Nvidia dropped Gingerbread support for Harmony, which means tablets running the new Cyanogenmod 7 won’t have hardware acceleration. The article should be updated to reflect this fact.
I already mentioned that, but not in grave detail.
I just bought my 10.1″ Viewsonic gTablet three weeks ago and just found out today that Viewsonic will not be able to update me to Gingerbread 2.3 because of this.
NVIDIA has such a stellar rep for support of their other products. I have an NVIDIA video card that is five years old and can still download up to date drivers for the latest windows versions.
Such an unexpected dissapointment!
Just be sure to vote with your feet, and not buy another nvidia powered tablet. They may well drop support for it by fall, if this trick works for them.
TI has a good chipset.
Just buy honeycomb tablets problem solved
I have a feeling Nvidia screw up with Harmony and thus would not want to take the risk to proceed further…..
And this is why I hate Nvidia. As much as people hate on Samsung they are the most open company when it comes to open-sourcing and Android. They also do not lock down their devices at all. If only samsung didn’t use BML partition layout, put the radio on onenand, integrated recovery into the kernel, download mode, and all the other ways that Samsung can possibly make their phones different than all the others out there.
Latest update states that it is only support for the dev board that is halted:
http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/honeycomb-harmony
Nvidia update:
Sorry folks looks like I caused a bit of confusion. Since this is a developer forum my comments
were targeted at Tegra Honeycomb developers and for this we’d like to focus on Ventana. For shipping or production products, customers should contact the device makers directly for OS support plans. They are responsible for the OS shipping on their device.
In relation to our linux kernel git repository, NVIDIA will continue to provide full open-source support for all of our kernel components and will push more of that upstream over time.
Andrew Edelsten
Tegra Developer Relations
NVIDIA Corporation
http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/honeycomb-harmony
Notion Ink doesnt seem to care too much.
There’s been a topic on the official Notion Ink topic about Honeycomb, started on april 8th and until now, no one from Notion Ink has bothered to answer.
The newest update
UPDATE 13 APRIL 2011
A lot has been read into a very short post about a Tegra development kit. I’d like to clear up a few points.
First, nothing changes in what we’re delivering to the open source community or customers. NVIDIA will continue to post the Tegra kernel to kernel.org and publish our Android code to our public git servers. Additionally, we will continue to make our BSP (codecs, GPU driver etc) available to all our hardware partners. We will continue to do this and nothing about these processes has changed.
For our partners’ Android devices, NVIDIA provides support until the hardware partner chooses to no longer support the device. So, for instance, NVIDIA will support the Xoom on all versions of Android Motorola requests until Motorola ceases to support the Xoom. The same goes for ViewSonic with the G-Tablet, Notion Ink with the Adam, Acer with the Iconia, LG with the Optimus 2X and so on.
In relation to my original reply, that was a response to a specific question about a Tegra 250 Development Kit. Given the confusion, we will work with owners of Tegra 250 Development Kits individually to determine their needs. The term “Harmony” is an internal codename for the Tegra 250 Development Kit. It is not a tablet reference design. Each shipping tablet is a custom design with varying hardware components and requires a custom OS image from the OEM who made the tablet.
Finally, while we cannot support or give out third party peripheral drivers or provide the Android 3.0 source before Google does, we do want to explore whether we can assist the open source ROM makers. We will be reaching out to them today.
Andrew Edelsten
Tegra Developer Relations
NVIDIA Corporation