There are hardly (or probably none at all) any Android handsets available that can't be rooted, as in getting access to the system as SU. However, "rooting" on Android is much more than that, as it usually comes with installing a custom recovery and allowing the user to flash pretty much anything he/she wants... kernels, baseband, a completely new operating system...
The problem on Motorola devices is simply that the bootloader only accepts signed kernels, and Motorola is the only entity with the ability to sign the kernels. This doesn't necessarily limit moddability (you should have seen the crazy ass hacks people resorted to on the Milestone...), but makes it a lot more difficult, and completely disallows home-brewed OS upgrades, unless you build them around the existing kernel of one of Motorola's builds. Don't feel like waiting for Moto to get off their ass and push an Android 2.3/2.4/3.0 OTA? Install one of the many custom ROMs that would be available if Moto didn't lock down their handsets.
Hell, half of all Android enthusiasts are probably running Gingerbread on their (non-Nexus-S) phones right now - not possible with Moto's handsets, since you'd need an official Moto upgrade to get past the bootloader.:(
You may have root access, but you can't put any of the fantastic community builds of Android on there. CyanogenMod on the Droid 2? Never gonna happen.
And how long is Moto going to take to upgrade to Android 2.3? 2.4? You'll be lucky if you get more than one upgrade cycle... and forget upgrading yourself - that bootloader won't let you.
Reply to this exact thread again in a year and tell us if you still feel the same way;)
I've learned my lesson with the Droid 2's predecessor (or rather the international version, the Milestone): DON'T BUY MOTOROLA ANDROID PRODUCTS.
What's the point of completions when they're wrong half the time? I can type pretty well with my thumbs, and a decently responsive touchscreen will allow you to type at a relatively error-free rate... you just have to work at it.
It's nothing against a hardware keyboard, of course, but much faster than typing with autocorrect on and having to correct the corrections all the time.
For people who type slowly with their thumbs, I'm sure Autocomplete is a godsend. For people who aren't technophobes, I'm guessing not so much...
...even when it's not being embarrassing. Autocorrect algorithms are so incredibly stupid that it's hard to believe... things like autocorrecting piison to prison instead of poison or "meibe" (german for my) to to "keine" instead of "meine" just piss me off. iOS does better than most others, but still can't make out what I'm trying to type most of the time... I end up taking longer correcting the mistakes Autocorrect makes than I take when I just turn it off.
Autocorrect is the first thing I disable on pretty much any touchscreen device.
Seems trivial to get around lock screens by just plugging in a USB cable and using ADB Pull to get at, well, pretty much all the files on the device.:(
What problem? The Atrix is a complete package that doesn't require modification...
Current smartphone hardware that doesn't have these features built right in? Yep, of course you'll need to mod it if you're planning on hooking up a keyboard, mouse (although a few manufacturers are starting to add their own Bluetooth HID profiles to Android devices) and monitor for use as a PC. What did you expect?
And as for Joe Sixpack - don't you think he'd be perfectly satisfied with a tablet and an XBox for the big screen? Again... what do these people use their computers for? Facebook, Youtube and maybe even E-Mail. Do people like that even NEED a mouse or a keyboard? Hell, these are the people who actually PREFER touchscreens - it's geeks like us that will be keeping physical keyboards around for the next years.
And I certainly don't see what this has to do with FUD. Uncertainty maybe, doubt also possibly - but why fear? I can't wait until I can put a full-fledged computer in my pocket. Currently it's doable, but not comfortable enough, as you have rightly pointed out...
Agreed. Who cares whether the processing power is housed in a mid-tower PC case or in the smartphone in your pocket (connected to the desktop monitor and input devices via wireless HDMI and Bluetooth or some other standards)?
See Motorola Atrix for an idea of the direction we'll be taking. Hell, if my Desire had video out I'd already be using it that way - bluetooth HID keyboards and mice are available and work fantastically with CyanogenMod (use them with RDP mainly).
Maybe it's a WiFi network thing. Although mine's nothing special or weird, just regular old WPA2-PSK, no MAC filtering, DHCP on... there's a bunch of people who have had problems though.:(
S-OFF'd HTC Desire with CM7. I'm definitely not the only one with these problems though, check out the Winamp for Android forum (on forums.winamp.com)... although I'm probably the loudest complainer;)
If it works for you, that's great, of course. Do you use the WiFi sync regularly?
I beg to differ. The Winamp app for Android is horrid... and I say that as someone who's been using Winamp since the early 2.x days.
1. It's basically just a skin on top of the default Android playback system, and doesn't offer any additional features other than Shoutcast. 2. The wireless sync is buggy and doesn't work properly 80% of the time. Wireless device discovery is completely fucked up and takes a lot of praying and swearing to get Winamp to recognize the device... 3. The latest Winamp (on Windows) versions, with the Android sync plugin, are buggy as all fuck. They've broken support for plugins that I use (Tagger!) and love, and there are horrendous bugs present. Try setting up a queue of say 20 songs to transfer to an Android device connected via USB, then select 10 of the songs and remove them from the queue. Winamp doesn't remove the selected songs, but rather the top 10 songs... WTF? Where's the QA? I've reported the bug, of course, and it was even acknowledged, but hey, no need to push out a quick bugfix. It's been weeks now, and there are a lot of bugs present that would merit a quick fix... 4. It has none of the features that I would have expected - Winamp Remote (streaming!) support, synchronization of ratings and playcounts into the Winamp media library, reading album art from jpg files...
Player Pro does all of the things mentioned in point 4 except for streaming, btw, as well as automatic album art downloads;). Finally i can rate songs when I'm on the go and sync them back into the Winamp library when I'm ready to transfer add new music to the device. Still waiting on ReplayGain support though...
PS: Yes, I'm a bit pissed off at the Winamp dev team for churning out this crap. I've bought multiple Winamp Pro licenses and am deeply disappointed by the fact that most small-time Android devs (i.e. one-man hobby dev shops) can do a much better job.:(
"If you have pop-ups enabled, it appears in the middle of your screen as it happens. You click on the pop-up to get to the message. Going back is a bit more convoluted. You have to tap the home button twice to bring up the list of running applications, then tap the app you were in to go back. It's not bad, though the double-tap of the home button for multitasking is not that intuitive."
Ouch. And what happens if you don't have popups enabled? Just a status bar notification and the usual ringtone/vibrate?
I've always wondered why iOS users don't go completely crazy without a back button though... always annoyed me within 10 seconds of picking up an iPhone.
"Remember, though, that Android and other platforms are building from what was learned on iOS. The closest thing to an iOS type operating system was Palm, and there are many reasons why that was light years different. Don't get me started on the royal crap that was smartphones at the time of the iPhone launch."
Hah, I used Windows Mobile pretty much until the iPhone 3GS came out. You're right, it was absolute crap... and I'm eternally thankful to Apple for bringing smartphones (my current HTC Desire with CM7 is something I've pretty much dreamed about since I was about ten or twelve years old) to the general public, which never would have happened without their simplistic, intuitive interface. I'm just surprised that Apple is sticking to its tried and true roots so stubbornly instead of just evolving.
That said, most iOS apps at east have back buttons for in-app navigation, don't they? And there are always those annoying apps on Android that don't implement back functionality properly - PlayerPro, my music player, for instance, has an on-screen back button (same place as on iOS usually), and the hardware back button takes you out of the app instead of just to the last view/activity/whatever. That reminds me, I have to go file a bug report/complaint about that:p
"I still have yet to understand what's so amazing about iOS, from a GUI point of view. It's incredibly sparse and lacking in workflow functionality. The steps you have to take when you get an email or a text message, for example, are far more convoluted than on Android (in which you pull down the notification bar (regardless of what you're doing), tap the email/text, read it, then just hit the back arrow twice to immediately go back to what you were doing."
Having never used iOS long enough to actually receive an e-mail or text and read it (I've never actually owned an iOS device)... what are the steps you'd have to take in order to open a newly received e-mail? Android's way seems to intuitive that I can't really imagine many other concepts. A pop-up? Or do you have to go to the home screen and launch the relevant app?
Yup, a lot of it has to do with the design philosophy as well, and the default web browser is a very good example of that. If you install Opera, for instance, you'll get that same iPhone-smooth web page scrolling, but at the cost of checkering.
Some of the cases you mention (lists & market) are cases of not precaching the whole list into memory. Since Gingerbread, for instance, the "Manage apps" dialog has precached lists, making scrolling buttery smooth at the cost of taking two seconds or so to load the dialog... in Froyo and previous builds, the app icons and names in this dialog were pulled up as you scrolled down, but the list itself showed up instantly.
In the market, of course, the problem is that the lists are also pulled in just a bit at a time, with only minimal precaching - great for bandwidth, horrible for scrolling smoothness. The app only seems to load the next 10 apps (or rather icons and names) or so, while a single flick can take you past 50. Geez, just pull in the next 200 or so and cache 'em, especially if you're on WiFi...
I may be a huge Android fan, but I have no problem admitting that iOS's UI performance/smoothness/responsiveness is still quite a bit better. Android is catching up slowly, but it's all software accelerated, whereas iOS seems to use actual hardware acceleration for the UI... until Android makes the jump to hardware acceleration, that gap will always be there.:)
Do you notice this with phones too? I notice it a little myself on older devices (haven't had the chance to play with a Nexus S yet), but nothing horrible or even annoying, to be honest. The tablets do seem a bit laggy in many videos, but it's difficult to tell without actually using the device. As you've probably had a chance to compare - worse than the phones? Or the same?
Well that sucks. As an idea though: Do you guys have prepaid plans with decent data packages these days? You could buy a bunch of cards and swap 'em out.
I can buy 5GB for 15 on my prepaid card here in Germany, as often as I want (usually I just buy one per month, since it's only for my phone, and the package expires monthly - it's on vacation that I might buy 5 or 6 packages in the space of a week). Isn't there something similar in the States?
Please, PLEASE take Motorola off that list. Milestone and Defy owners are STILL waiting on Froyo, and the bootloaders are signed so that you can't roll your own updates. The lowest of the low, when it comes to Android device manufacturers.
Gingerbread on those devices, whether officially or community builds? Very unlikely...:(
Right now I'm running Gingerbread Pre-anything-remotely-related-to-being-near-even-public-alpha-status builds, which are built from source every night by a third party (in an inofficial capacity) while CyanogenMod devs merge CyanogenMod with Gingerbread AOSP source... and what can I say? It's much more stable and faster than practically all of the official Android builds I've used. These are builds that are so early that there aren't even experimental nightly builds yet, and they're ROCK SOLID.
Samsung's Galaxy S builds and Motorola's Milestone builds are perfect examples of the manufacturer's ROM being FAR worse than community builds, both in terms of speed, stability, features, and even just basic functionality.
Actually, this isn't a matter of permission. The Samsung Galaxy S phones are easily rooted and you can put any of the many awesome community ROMs on there...
It's more of a matter of Samsung not providing the update. Which despicable just the same, but an entirely different matter.
Now Motorola on the other hand - Far too few updates, false advertising (Flash on the Milestone, anyone?), AND locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing community ROMs with custom kernels.
With the right handset (Nexus, most HTC devices), there is no walled garden, because the devices are hacked wide open within days of release.
Even on the Samsung phone in question, there is no walled-garden app store, and unless you want to run an app that actually requires root privileges, you don't need to modify the phone at all. You can download packages anywhere, or bake your own, and install them after ticking a simple checkbox in the Android settings dialog.
Updates, on the other hand, are another story. Vibrant owners are free to roll their own, but without having the full set of drivers open-sourced by Samsung, they're always hamstrung in some way or another. Same thing with most HTC devices, and even worse on Motorola, what with the signed bootloader and all.
Apple has a clear advantage in the area of updates... Windows Phone 7 should (I say should, since we haven't seen any updates yet) too.
"When a consumer goes to the store and buys an Android phone, what are the chances they are going to know how well that particular implementation works, any more than I can know how well mine works before I buy it? My understanding is that unless you get a Nexus phone you are always using non-stock Android, so I assume my experience is pretty typical."
That is PRECISELY the problem I currently have with the whole Android ecosystem. It's so big and confusing that unwitting consumers are pretty much fucked.
Rule #1: Avoid Motorola devices at all costs. Not only are they locked down completely so that you can't swap out the software for custom builds (with the exception of the original Droid, that still had an unsigned bootloader), but the software itself is not very good, and their track record with bugs (not to mention with pushing out updates to FIX these bugs - Milestone and Defy are STILL waiting on Froyo o.O) on Android has been quite horrendous. The builds I used for a year on the Motorola Milestone (2.0, 2.1xx32, 2.1xx36 and the leaked Froyo [only played with the last one for a few hours on a friend's phone though, because I'd already returned my handset at that point - completely fed up]) were slow, buggy and unstable.
Rule #2: Buy a Nexus phone, OR be prepared to root and install a custom ROM that you really like (you should research this BEFORE buying). Of course, some devices run quite well even without tweaks - HTC's last- and latest-gen high-end devices are astonishingly polished (at least compared to other manufacturers' Android builds) in terms of software. This is, however, unfortunately not the norm, with companies like Samsung and Motorola bringing up the rear as the worst offenders.
People who know what they're doing are all running custom builds like CyanogenMod, with rock-solid custom kernels tweaked for insane speed and stability (I haven't had an unwanted reboot for months, and I'm running experimental nightly CyanogenMod builds), so they're all fine. It's the people who go into a store and buy the coolest phone in their price range that are getting screwed... getting stuck with the equivalent of crapware-loaded Windows XP, but with worse stability and reliability in many cases.
As for the feature issue: Yep, you're right, Android really is lacking features that many people see as complete no-brainers (So go star the issues on the bugtracker)... However, it's largely bug-free until the manufacturers start fucking with it. And hey, it has copy & paste, so stop complaining;)
"No, because I like Motorola's integrated inbox feature."
Then realize that Motorola's modified E-mail clients are junk. You're blaming the entire platform for your handset manufacturer's faulty software. The stock Android e-mail client works just fine, both with IMAP and POP, and there are many alternatives that offer additional features if you're into that sort of thing. If Moto went and fucked that up, well, the blame needs to be placed squarely on their plate.
One should note that this is specific to the crappy Motorola software. Stock AOSP Android is actually quite reliable, and has been for quite a while. Since 2.2 there are no more show-stopping bugs at all that I've seen, and even vanilla 2.1 was MUCH better than the builds Moto put out for the Milestone back when I still owned one.
Since CyanogenMod6 nightlies stopped building (a few weeks) I've stopped rebooting regularly (used to reboot to flash the latest nightly, well, nightly), and my Desire runs for 3-10 days at a time until I need to reboot for some reason (usually to flash an experimental Gingerbread build and see if it's usable yet). AOSP & CyanogenMod are rock solid.
Don't blame Android for Motorola's shortcomings... I was frustrated back when I had my Milestone too. Crashes (the camera was especially prone to those), lag galore, things just stopped working after a while, requiring a reboot. When I got my Desire and switched to AOSP builds, all that just went away.
I couldn't agree more. One of the most pleasant things I've noticed since becoming a heavy Android user is that small-time devs are much better at listening to their customers' complaints, and actually read their own forums, answering users' questions and acknowledging bug reports and feature requests.
I'm surprised many people don't seem to care about this kind of thing. Getting an answer within 24 hours from a dev, whether by forum, e-mail or whatever, will greatly help my willingness to send cash his way:)
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There are hardly (or probably none at all) any Android handsets available that can't be rooted, as in getting access to the system as SU. However, "rooting" on Android is much more than that, as it usually comes with installing a custom recovery and allowing the user to flash pretty much anything he/she wants... kernels, baseband, a completely new operating system...
The problem on Motorola devices is simply that the bootloader only accepts signed kernels, and Motorola is the only entity with the ability to sign the kernels. This doesn't necessarily limit moddability (you should have seen the crazy ass hacks people resorted to on the Milestone...), but makes it a lot more difficult, and completely disallows home-brewed OS upgrades, unless you build them around the existing kernel of one of Motorola's builds. Don't feel like waiting for Moto to get off their ass and push an Android 2.3/2.4/3.0 OTA? Install one of the many custom ROMs that would be available if Moto didn't lock down their handsets.
Hell, half of all Android enthusiasts are probably running Gingerbread on their (non-Nexus-S) phones right now - not possible with Moto's handsets, since you'd need an official Moto upgrade to get past the bootloader. :(
You may have root access, but you can't put any of the fantastic community builds of Android on there. CyanogenMod on the Droid 2? Never gonna happen.
And how long is Moto going to take to upgrade to Android 2.3? 2.4? You'll be lucky if you get more than one upgrade cycle... and forget upgrading yourself - that bootloader won't let you.
Reply to this exact thread again in a year and tell us if you still feel the same way ;)
I've learned my lesson with the Droid 2's predecessor (or rather the international version, the Milestone): DON'T BUY MOTOROLA ANDROID PRODUCTS.
What's the point of completions when they're wrong half the time? I can type pretty well with my thumbs, and a decently responsive touchscreen will allow you to type at a relatively error-free rate... you just have to work at it.
It's nothing against a hardware keyboard, of course, but much faster than typing with autocorrect on and having to correct the corrections all the time.
For people who type slowly with their thumbs, I'm sure Autocomplete is a godsend. For people who aren't technophobes, I'm guessing not so much...
...even when it's not being embarrassing. Autocorrect algorithms are so incredibly stupid that it's hard to believe... things like autocorrecting piison to prison instead of poison or "meibe" (german for my) to to "keine" instead of "meine" just piss me off. iOS does better than most others, but still can't make out what I'm trying to type most of the time... I end up taking longer correcting the mistakes Autocorrect makes than I take when I just turn it off.
Autocorrect is the first thing I disable on pretty much any touchscreen device.
FU Autocorrect!
I'd be more worried about the asses. You need to buy a keyboard that doesn't skip letters... :p
What about Android in general?
Seems trivial to get around lock screens by just plugging in a USB cable and using ADB Pull to get at, well, pretty much all the files on the device. :(
What problem? The Atrix is a complete package that doesn't require modification...
Current smartphone hardware that doesn't have these features built right in? Yep, of course you'll need to mod it if you're planning on hooking up a keyboard, mouse (although a few manufacturers are starting to add their own Bluetooth HID profiles to Android devices) and monitor for use as a PC. What did you expect?
And as for Joe Sixpack - don't you think he'd be perfectly satisfied with a tablet and an XBox for the big screen? Again... what do these people use their computers for? Facebook, Youtube and maybe even E-Mail. Do people like that even NEED a mouse or a keyboard? Hell, these are the people who actually PREFER touchscreens - it's geeks like us that will be keeping physical keyboards around for the next years.
And I certainly don't see what this has to do with FUD. Uncertainty maybe, doubt also possibly - but why fear? I can't wait until I can put a full-fledged computer in my pocket. Currently it's doable, but not comfortable enough, as you have rightly pointed out...
Agreed. Who cares whether the processing power is housed in a mid-tower PC case or in the smartphone in your pocket (connected to the desktop monitor and input devices via wireless HDMI and Bluetooth or some other standards)?
See Motorola Atrix for an idea of the direction we'll be taking. Hell, if my Desire had video out I'd already be using it that way - bluetooth HID keyboards and mice are available and work fantastically with CyanogenMod (use them with RDP mainly).
Maybe it's a WiFi network thing. Although mine's nothing special or weird, just regular old WPA2-PSK, no MAC filtering, DHCP on... there's a bunch of people who have had problems though. :(
S-OFF'd HTC Desire with CM7. I'm definitely not the only one with these problems though, check out the Winamp for Android forum (on forums.winamp.com)... although I'm probably the loudest complainer ;)
If it works for you, that's great, of course. Do you use the WiFi sync regularly?
I beg to differ. The Winamp app for Android is horrid... and I say that as someone who's been using Winamp since the early 2.x days.
1. It's basically just a skin on top of the default Android playback system, and doesn't offer any additional features other than Shoutcast.
2. The wireless sync is buggy and doesn't work properly 80% of the time. Wireless device discovery is completely fucked up and takes a lot of praying and swearing to get Winamp to recognize the device...
3. The latest Winamp (on Windows) versions, with the Android sync plugin, are buggy as all fuck. They've broken support for plugins that I use (Tagger!) and love, and there are horrendous bugs present. Try setting up a queue of say 20 songs to transfer to an Android device connected via USB, then select 10 of the songs and remove them from the queue. Winamp doesn't remove the selected songs, but rather the top 10 songs... WTF? Where's the QA? I've reported the bug, of course, and it was even acknowledged, but hey, no need to push out a quick bugfix. It's been weeks now, and there are a lot of bugs present that would merit a quick fix...
4. It has none of the features that I would have expected - Winamp Remote (streaming!) support, synchronization of ratings and playcounts into the Winamp media library, reading album art from jpg files...
Player Pro does all of the things mentioned in point 4 except for streaming, btw, as well as automatic album art downloads ;). Finally i can rate songs when I'm on the go and sync them back into the Winamp library when I'm ready to transfer add new music to the device. Still waiting on ReplayGain support though...
PS: Yes, I'm a bit pissed off at the Winamp dev team for churning out this crap. I've bought multiple Winamp Pro licenses and am deeply disappointed by the fact that most small-time Android devs (i.e. one-man hobby dev shops) can do a much better job. :(
"If you have pop-ups enabled, it appears in the middle of your screen as it happens. You click on the pop-up to get to the message. Going back is a bit more convoluted. You have to tap the home button twice to bring up the list of running applications, then tap the app you were in to go back. It's not bad, though the double-tap of the home button for multitasking is not that intuitive."
Ouch. And what happens if you don't have popups enabled? Just a status bar notification and the usual ringtone/vibrate?
I've always wondered why iOS users don't go completely crazy without a back button though... always annoyed me within 10 seconds of picking up an iPhone.
"Remember, though, that Android and other platforms are building from what was learned on iOS. The closest thing to an iOS type operating system was Palm, and there are many reasons why that was light years different. Don't get me started on the royal crap that was smartphones at the time of the iPhone launch."
Hah, I used Windows Mobile pretty much until the iPhone 3GS came out. You're right, it was absolute crap... and I'm eternally thankful to Apple for bringing smartphones (my current HTC Desire with CM7 is something I've pretty much dreamed about since I was about ten or twelve years old) to the general public, which never would have happened without their simplistic, intuitive interface. I'm just surprised that Apple is sticking to its tried and true roots so stubbornly instead of just evolving.
That said, most iOS apps at east have back buttons for in-app navigation, don't they? And there are always those annoying apps on Android that don't implement back functionality properly - PlayerPro, my music player, for instance, has an on-screen back button (same place as on iOS usually), and the hardware back button takes you out of the app instead of just to the last view/activity/whatever. That reminds me, I have to go file a bug report/complaint about that :p
"I still have yet to understand what's so amazing about iOS, from a GUI point of view. It's incredibly sparse and lacking in workflow functionality. The steps you have to take when you get an email or a text message, for example, are far more convoluted than on Android (in which you pull down the notification bar (regardless of what you're doing), tap the email/text, read it, then just hit the back arrow twice to immediately go back to what you were doing."
Having never used iOS long enough to actually receive an e-mail or text and read it (I've never actually owned an iOS device)... what are the steps you'd have to take in order to open a newly received e-mail? Android's way seems to intuitive that I can't really imagine many other concepts. A pop-up? Or do you have to go to the home screen and launch the relevant app?
Yup, a lot of it has to do with the design philosophy as well, and the default web browser is a very good example of that. If you install Opera, for instance, you'll get that same iPhone-smooth web page scrolling, but at the cost of checkering.
Some of the cases you mention (lists & market) are cases of not precaching the whole list into memory. Since Gingerbread, for instance, the "Manage apps" dialog has precached lists, making scrolling buttery smooth at the cost of taking two seconds or so to load the dialog... in Froyo and previous builds, the app icons and names in this dialog were pulled up as you scrolled down, but the list itself showed up instantly.
In the market, of course, the problem is that the lists are also pulled in just a bit at a time, with only minimal precaching - great for bandwidth, horrible for scrolling smoothness. The app only seems to load the next 10 apps (or rather icons and names) or so, while a single flick can take you past 50. Geez, just pull in the next 200 or so and cache 'em, especially if you're on WiFi...
I may be a huge Android fan, but I have no problem admitting that iOS's UI performance/smoothness/responsiveness is still quite a bit better. Android is catching up slowly, but it's all software accelerated, whereas iOS seems to use actual hardware acceleration for the UI... until Android makes the jump to hardware acceleration, that gap will always be there. :)
Do you notice this with phones too? I notice it a little myself on older devices (haven't had the chance to play with a Nexus S yet), but nothing horrible or even annoying, to be honest. The tablets do seem a bit laggy in many videos, but it's difficult to tell without actually using the device. As you've probably had a chance to compare - worse than the phones? Or the same?
Well that sucks. As an idea though: Do you guys have prepaid plans with decent data packages these days? You could buy a bunch of cards and swap 'em out.
I can buy 5GB for 15 on my prepaid card here in Germany, as often as I want (usually I just buy one per month, since it's only for my phone, and the package expires monthly - it's on vacation that I might buy 5 or 6 packages in the space of a week). Isn't there something similar in the States?
Please, PLEASE take Motorola off that list. Milestone and Defy owners are STILL waiting on Froyo, and the bootloaders are signed so that you can't roll your own updates. The lowest of the low, when it comes to Android device manufacturers.
Gingerbread on those devices, whether officially or community builds? Very unlikely... :(
Apparently you've never used CyanogenMod.
Right now I'm running Gingerbread Pre-anything-remotely-related-to-being-near-even-public-alpha-status builds, which are built from source every night by a third party (in an inofficial capacity) while CyanogenMod devs merge CyanogenMod with Gingerbread AOSP source... and what can I say? It's much more stable and faster than practically all of the official Android builds I've used. These are builds that are so early that there aren't even experimental nightly builds yet, and they're ROCK SOLID.
Samsung's Galaxy S builds and Motorola's Milestone builds are perfect examples of the manufacturer's ROM being FAR worse than community builds, both in terms of speed, stability, features, and even just basic functionality.
Actually, this isn't a matter of permission. The Samsung Galaxy S phones are easily rooted and you can put any of the many awesome community ROMs on there...
It's more of a matter of Samsung not providing the update. Which despicable just the same, but an entirely different matter.
Now Motorola on the other hand - Far too few updates, false advertising (Flash on the Milestone, anyone?), AND locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing community ROMs with custom kernels.
With the right handset (Nexus, most HTC devices), there is no walled garden, because the devices are hacked wide open within days of release.
Even on the Samsung phone in question, there is no walled-garden app store, and unless you want to run an app that actually requires root privileges, you don't need to modify the phone at all. You can download packages anywhere, or bake your own, and install them after ticking a simple checkbox in the Android settings dialog.
Updates, on the other hand, are another story. Vibrant owners are free to roll their own, but without having the full set of drivers open-sourced by Samsung, they're always hamstrung in some way or another. Same thing with most HTC devices, and even worse on Motorola, what with the signed bootloader and all.
Apple has a clear advantage in the area of updates... Windows Phone 7 should (I say should, since we haven't seen any updates yet) too.
"When a consumer goes to the store and buys an Android phone, what are the chances they are going to know how well that particular implementation works, any more than I can know how well mine works before I buy it? My understanding is that unless you get a Nexus phone you are always using non-stock Android, so I assume my experience is pretty typical."
That is PRECISELY the problem I currently have with the whole Android ecosystem. It's so big and confusing that unwitting consumers are pretty much fucked.
Rule #1: Avoid Motorola devices at all costs. Not only are they locked down completely so that you can't swap out the software for custom builds (with the exception of the original Droid, that still had an unsigned bootloader), but the software itself is not very good, and their track record with bugs (not to mention with pushing out updates to FIX these bugs - Milestone and Defy are STILL waiting on Froyo o.O) on Android has been quite horrendous. The builds I used for a year on the Motorola Milestone (2.0, 2.1xx32, 2.1xx36 and the leaked Froyo [only played with the last one for a few hours on a friend's phone though, because I'd already returned my handset at that point - completely fed up]) were slow, buggy and unstable.
Rule #2: Buy a Nexus phone, OR be prepared to root and install a custom ROM that you really like (you should research this BEFORE buying). Of course, some devices run quite well even without tweaks - HTC's last- and latest-gen high-end devices are astonishingly polished (at least compared to other manufacturers' Android builds) in terms of software. This is, however, unfortunately not the norm, with companies like Samsung and Motorola bringing up the rear as the worst offenders.
People who know what they're doing are all running custom builds like CyanogenMod, with rock-solid custom kernels tweaked for insane speed and stability (I haven't had an unwanted reboot for months, and I'm running experimental nightly CyanogenMod builds), so they're all fine. It's the people who go into a store and buy the coolest phone in their price range that are getting screwed... getting stuck with the equivalent of crapware-loaded Windows XP, but with worse stability and reliability in many cases.
As for the feature issue: Yep, you're right, Android really is lacking features that many people see as complete no-brainers (So go star the issues on the bugtracker)... However, it's largely bug-free until the manufacturers start fucking with it. And hey, it has copy & paste, so stop complaining ;)
"No, because I like Motorola's integrated inbox feature."
Then realize that Motorola's modified E-mail clients are junk. You're blaming the entire platform for your handset manufacturer's faulty software. The stock Android e-mail client works just fine, both with IMAP and POP, and there are many alternatives that offer additional features if you're into that sort of thing. If Moto went and fucked that up, well, the blame needs to be placed squarely on their plate.
One should note that this is specific to the crappy Motorola software. Stock AOSP Android is actually quite reliable, and has been for quite a while. Since 2.2 there are no more show-stopping bugs at all that I've seen, and even vanilla 2.1 was MUCH better than the builds Moto put out for the Milestone back when I still owned one.
Since CyanogenMod6 nightlies stopped building (a few weeks) I've stopped rebooting regularly (used to reboot to flash the latest nightly, well, nightly), and my Desire runs for 3-10 days at a time until I need to reboot for some reason (usually to flash an experimental Gingerbread build and see if it's usable yet). AOSP & CyanogenMod are rock solid.
Don't blame Android for Motorola's shortcomings... I was frustrated back when I had my Milestone too. Crashes (the camera was especially prone to those), lag galore, things just stopped working after a while, requiring a reboot. When I got my Desire and switched to AOSP builds, all that just went away.
I couldn't agree more. One of the most pleasant things I've noticed since becoming a heavy Android user is that small-time devs are much better at listening to their customers' complaints, and actually read their own forums, answering users' questions and acknowledging bug reports and feature requests.
I'm surprised many people don't seem to care about this kind of thing. Getting an answer within 24 hours from a dev, whether by forum, e-mail or whatever, will greatly help my willingness to send cash his way :)