While I don’t think there were too many people that were excited about these two phones in the first place, but the people that did buy the Motorola Charm or the Flipout will be a little disappointed by this news. Motorola has updated their Software Upgrade page and the Charm and Flipout are stated to remain on Android 2.1, with no upgrade. Ever.

Sure you could blame it on ho-hum sales or just the fact that they’re low end phones, but that’s no excuse. HTC, just issued updates for the Tattoo and Hero, some of the lowest and oldest phones in their portfolio.

Although not as unfortunate as the CLIQ XT or i1, which will remain on Android 1.5, but Motorola really needs to take a page from the HTC play book and support their older hardware. That or quit adding MotoBlur on top of Android since it apparently hinders you from updating the firmware to the latest version.

[via Android Central]

Many of you are readers of Gizmodo I’m sure. They’re one of the 800lb gorillas in the tech blog world and hard to ignore. But you may have missed a short little post yesterday about the CLIQ XT upgrade (or lack thereof) that I want to make further light of. Probably some of the best buying advice when it comes to Android phones. Forget screen size and dual core and megapixel counts for a second, just listen to this:

Never buy a phone on the promise that it might get upgraded someday. Buy it for the features and the software that it comes with today. Period.

That is literally going to be the cornerstone of my shopping advice whenever someone asks me what phone they should get. Every day I hear from people wondering when this upgrade is coming to this phone. And if Google keeps updating Android, which they will, the cycle will never stop and inevitably some phones will get left out in the cold. Granted, there are sometimes other upgrade avenues available via the developer community. Yes, even the original Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, has a version of Gingerbread ported to it.

A fair amount of the phones announced at CES last month are said to come with Android 2.2, of course quickly followed up with a promise to upgrade to Gingerbread. I’m willing to bet one or more of those devices may not see it for another year. What version of Android will we be on then?

If you bought a new car, then next year’s model came out with some new fangled feature, would you take it back to the dealer begging them to add the feature to your car? Probably not.

If you’re going to buy a phone and sign away two years of your life to a carrier to get it at a good price, make sure you can either be happy with that phone, as-is, for two years. Or be able to afford to upgrade early. Or find an alternative way to update the software as mentioned earlier.

Thoughts? Comments? Death threats?

In case you haven’t seen it already, here’s the current Motorola rollout schedule for Android 2.1 upgrades. The screenshot speaks for itself, but to recap, the Droid is already running 2.1, most other phones should be getting it before the middle of summer, but BackFlip owners will have to wait till Fall. And even more sour news for DEXT and Devour users. But at least we know where Motorola stands. The information is subject to change, hit the link for the latest info on Motorola Android upgrade plans.

[Motorola]

A recent PowerPoint slide (shown below) revealed that the Motorola Zeppelin (shown above), named the CLIQ XT should be coming to T-Mobile USA launching on March 10th. It’s been described as a “CLIQ without a keyboard”, and should appeal to users that want MotoBLUR, but in a much slimmer design. Specs include MOTOBLUR running on 1.5 (why oh why?), a 3.2-inch HVGA screen, GPS, 5 MP camera with flash, and touch sensitive trackpad and navigational buttons. The price point is rumored to be at or below the current CLIQ, making it an attractive option for new smartphone buyers that don’t need to the high end specs of more expensive models.

[via PPCGeeks]