Huawei disappoint - No Jelly Bean for the Ascend G600

Telecom NZ Huawei G600

Huawei recently released the Ascend G600 (U8950D) here in New Zealand through Telecom NZ for the reasonable price of $399 NZD.


This mid-range handset has pretty decent specs for the price, with a dual core (Cortex-A5) processor, 8MP camera, and a 4.5" qHD display. The downside here being that it comes running Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, which is starting to feel a little dated as it was released in November 2011 (Over a year ago).

According to this Wikipedia article Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has been available since July 2012 - 6 months ago. I figured that a newly released handset would surely be getting an upgrade to Android 4.1 at least, let alone 4.2 (which is still Jelly Bean, but was released in November 2012).

So I got right onto contacting Huawei through Facebook, and found out that they don't value their customer base enough to provide ANY after sales support in the form of firmware updates.

According to Huawei Device NZ - there are no plans to upgrade the G600 to Jelly Bean. That's right, a brand new handset will not be receiving any updates to bring it up to the version of Android released 6 months ago. I have to say that I am deeply disappointed with Huawei's attitude here, especially after Google promoted the Android Update Alliance where manufacturers promised to provide 18 months of software updates for new devices (Note that Huawei has not signed up to this alliance).

Unfortunately, even despite the Android Update Alliance promising 18 months worth of upgrades for new Android devices, this appears to be quite a rampant problem across manufacturers (Motorola I'm looking at you).

I really hope Huawei pick up their game and start making plans to update their latest handsets to the most recent version of Android (or even the second most recent version). Huawei are still a fledgling consumer brand that do not have a large market share when it comes to Android handsets. This would go a long way towards helping consumers gain confidence in their products - something that is sorely lacking at the moment.