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Enlarge / Another Android update means another stack of phones that will never see it.

Not all of the big Android phone makers have announced their plans for the Nougat update, but if you look at Sony’s and Google’s and HTC’s official lists (as well as the supplemental lists being published by some carriers), you’ll notice they all have one big thing in common. None of the phones are more than a year or two old.

And while this is sadly the norm for the Android ecosystem, it looks like this isn’t exclusively the fault of lazy phone makers who have little incentive to provide support for anything they’ve already sold you. Sony, for instance, was working on a Nougat build for 2014’s Xperia Z3 and even got it added to the official Nougat developer program midway through, only to be dropped in the last beta build and the final Nougat release.

After doing some digging and talking to some people, we can say that it will be either very difficult if not completely impossible for any phone that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 or 801 to get an official, Google-sanctioned Nougat update (including the Z3). And that’s a pretty big deal, since those two chips powered practically every single Android flagship sold from late 2013 until late 2014 and a few more recent devices to boot.

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The HTC 10 is by far the best phone I've ever owned. It has a colourful, sharp screen that at 5.2-inches is big without verging into unwieldy phablet territory, while the all-metal design gives it a premium feel. It's fast too, thanks to a Snapdragon 820 chip and largely untouched version of Android. Its camera excels in low light, the battery easily gets me through a day (extended Pokémon Go sessions not withstanding), and the powerful headphone amp is the best available on a mainstream device. I even like its slightly portly dimensions.

But would I say the HTC 10 is an exciting device? No. If anything, I'd say it's rather dull.

It's a problem that nearly all the big smartphone manufacturers face. That last great bastion of smartphone quality held by Apple—the camera—was matched, if not beaten by nearly all of this year's flagship devices. Even the OnePlus 3, a phone with a premium design and specs, which costs a mere £330, stands toe-to-toe with phones costing twice as much, if not more. Cameras, screens, batteries, operating systems—they're largely the same across devices, and they're all very good. That's a great thing for consumers, but not so much for smartphone makers used to charging a premium for the basics. It takes a special something to stand out.

(credit: Jim Barton)

Dropbox hurriedly warned its users last week to change their passwords if their accounts dated back prior to mid-2012. We now know why: the cloud-based storage service suffered a data breach that's said to have affected more than 68 million accounts compromised during a hack that took place roughly four years ago.

The company had previously admitted that it was hit by a hack attack, but it's only now that the scale of the operation has seemingly come to light.

Tech site Motherboard reported—citing "sources in the database trading community"—that it had obtained four files, totalling 5GB in size, which apparently contained e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 68,680,741 Dropbox users.