Hasta La Gadget!

In my review of the Samsung Behold II smartphone, I wrote that the company botched the design of the phone by including clunky, pointless UI overlays on top of the basic Android 1.5 OS–most of which ruined performance while adding questionable new features.

Now it turns out Samsung is botching the promised Android upgrade, too. Engadget reports that the company has vacillated between saying there’s no longer a future release date for the promised Android 2.0 update, to even saying it will never come out at all, depending on the rep spoken to.

In turn, numerous Behold II owners have assembled a petition asking for a replacement, refund, or real OS update. The group is threatening legal action if none of those conditions are met.

None of this is much surprise to Android fans; whenever a phone ends up with a proprietary build, its chances for future Android OS updates plummet to near zero. I’m not sure why Samsung promised an update in this particular case. But it did, and now it hasn’t delivered.