Quote:
Originally Posted by ottischwenk
By performing the same actions on both devices at the same time and comparing on-screen activities.
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Ok, but that probably doesn't give you the precision needed to empirically support your claim that, if I understood correctly, the older devices are slower and the new Android versions require more resources and since they're both the same speed the older devices wouldn't be capable of running the newer Android versions (with acceptable performance).
You seem to be making two assumptions that you have not shown to be true (yet):
1) The older devices (e.g. Onyx Boox Note) have a slower SoC than the newer ones (eg Note 2). While this may be true, we don't know by how much. One would have to look up the specific Soc used - Onyx just say it's a quad core vs an octa core, but that doesn't tell us much about their respective performance. Indeed, the quad core on the old Note had consistently higher Geekbench scores than the octa-core Boyue Likebook Mars (which recently got an Android update). I wasn't able to run a direct comparison between Note and Note 2 because the current version of Geekbench 4 doesn't seem to complete benchmarks anymore on the older Note. (I was able to run Geekbench on it in 2018, so this might be an indication of possible software deprecation - admittedly in this particular case not a serious issue of functionality).
2) You assume that Android 8 would require more system resources to run at the same performance level as Android 6. While at first glance it seems like an appealing idea (new software - new features - new requirements), I have no idea if that is the case because apart from new features there are also potentially new optimisations that may or may not make a difference for a particular device.
You're observations of performing the same actions and considering then to perform (about) the same is fair enough for concluding that both devices are adequately usable, but it doesn't tell us anything about their respective capability in terms of technical performance and their ability to run newer Android versions.
For what it's worth, your observation on certain tasks might be limited by i/o speed, i.e. the storage, so if both SOCs are fast enough to deal with the maximum speed of the storage, you'd get a ceiling effect independently of any other differences in speed between the SOCs.
The only way to make qualified statements about SoC performance being a limiting factor to an Android update would be to compare the same (or at least very similarly specced) device running both versions.
This ended up a bit long, I mainly just wanted to make the methodological point here.
Anyway, I suspect that either Rockchip simply isn't offering adequate support (drivers etc) for porting Android 8 or 9 onto the older devices or Onyx decided it would be to much effort to do so. In either case (and independently of whether or not one needs the updated Android version), it is quite a deceptive strategy to first claim that there would be an update and then just let the issue slide into oblivion. One would assume that at that point they had in some form evaluated the feasibility of porting - and if it turns out they hit a wall, then at the very least they should correct their original statement.