(it’s a tablet in a smartphone form factor, it doesn’t have cellular connectivity)
For reference, android 14 was announced 6 months before the launch of this device.
It’s a bit surprising that Google still allows device certification with such ancient, unsupported and vulnerable OS.
All the marketing materials don’t say which CPU it’s using except “Qualcomm octa core CPU” - that means nothing as the description could apply to the Snapdragon 415, which was a low end slow system on a chip released ten years ago. Maybe it could explain why they’re using an ancient version of Android - the soc that they’re using it’s a leftover found in some warehouse and it’s already unsupported by the manufacturer; they’re forced to use android 11.
Not excusing the practice, but I’m pretty sure Boox products use a highly customized version of the android kernel to work better with eInk screens. It’s not as simple as just using the latest AOSP for them. Sadly, this also seems to be standard across all eInk Android tablets, though it looks like at least some Boox products use Android 12, while most of the space is stuck on Android 11.
Yeah, I see both parts of this.
BOOX advertises “Super Refresh” which makes eink almost able to play a YouTube video. There’s a lot of software (and probably hardware) development there.
Google still issues security patches for Android 12 as well.
It could be much worse. At least BOOX issues updates….