Sprint: No AKU3 for PPC6700

[chrismc]

Last October, I queried UTStarcom as to when they expected to release AKU3 for the PPC6700, and received this response:

AKU3 is scheduled for release some time in the 4th quarter of this year, pending final approval of the carrier.

Yesterday, I sent them a follow up request to see how progress was going on that, and received the following response:

In the time of October of 2006 we were told from our engineers that Sprint may have an update. Later down the year Sprint decided not to request an update from us. We apologize for you anticipation of AKU3.3. The only update we will have for carriers is the .cab file for Daylight Savings Time around the 2nd quarter this year.

So it looks like the PPC6700 is really dead and gone for Sprint, and we won't see any more "official" updates that aren't absolutely mandatory. It really pisses me off that UTStarcom was working on this update for Sprint, and then Sprint just decided that supporting their existing users wasn't worth the effort even though someone else was doing the work for them. Oh well, maybe my 6700 will "break" once the stock is gone and the 6800's are out...

Thanks to helmi_c for the AKU33 I'm running!

[4 Door Skyline]

hehehe "break"

[schettj]

It would be pretty easy to rework *any* 6700 AKU3.x release from UTStarCom to work with the Sprint-branded one - heck we're doing that now with wideawake's groundbreaking work on 2.2 and now all the 3.3 customs we're getting from folks.

So no worries. If they ever do roll one out we can use it. My guess is, once we get our teeth cut on Helmi's 3.3, we can just tag along with the great work the xda folks are doing on 3.5 in the Rom Kitchen, and get that working.

I'm not worried about running an unofficial rom - my gut feel is it's actually better then running the UTStarcom version

[luv2chill]

No surprise here. It was a very similar situation with the 6600. People were clamoring for an update (for the 6600 it was the one that enabled EV-DO) but in the meantime Sprint had the 6700 already in the pipeline and after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, in the end they decided not to pay the outrageous sum of money it would take to aquire, test and release a new rom for an EOL device. Trust me it was cheaper for them to give a new 6700 to the few complainers than pay to release a new rom.

I heard all the talk about an official 3.x update from Sprint and felt bad for the folks who were getting their hopes up. Sprint has zero incentive to do it.

What needs to happen in order to get frequent rom updates is the whole damn architecture needs to change. Rather than delegating everything to the OEMs, MS needs to take more responsibility in-house, and issue fixes like they do with Windows/Office/Microsoft Update on the PC side. So long as they can pretty well isolate the phone radio stuff from the rest then the carriers shouldn't have a problem with it and then that saves them the time and expense of testing every rom update before it can be released.

This is why we should all be thankful for xda-developers and the uber smart folks who help out over there (namely one mamaich, but there are lots of others). Without them we wouldn't have come nearly as far as we have.