In addition, despite their claims of supporting Linux on ARM, their Tegra open source support is piss-poor compared to TI's OMAP4 support.
Their mainline cpuidle support is still shit. They also have not published any TRM whatsoever for the chip, unlike TI who provides a comprehensive OMAP4 TRM.
Hell - they're so diverged from mainline that products running ICS are still running 2.6.39 kernels unlike 3.0.8 which is the official standard for Android devices running ICS.
Same thing with TI's OMAP TRMs - They provide DETAILED technical documentation without giving away any major secrets about how their stuff actually works.
"Are the Samsungs equally good at resisting falls?" - Because of their light weight and the superior strength-to-weight ratio of plastics, Samsungs have traditionally smoked Apple in drop tests.
I have a Note (the real international one, the N7000, not AT&T's mutated version) and love it. I would have major issues if I were to ever return to a smaller phone. My Galaxy S II (which has a monster 4.3" screen compared to the iPhone) feels like a tiny little toy now.
Like you, due to how thin the device is, it fits in my pockets without any issue at all. I don't use the stylus that much, but the big screen is wonderful.
One thing - To give him credit, he's had a lot of influence in bringing up CM on carrier-mangled derpbeasts like the AT&T Note (completely different from the international version), the T989, and the Shitrocket. (All three of which share a lot of commonality internally).
He hasn't had much involvement at all with the bringups of CM on Hummingbird (all of the original GalaxyS line) or Exynos (international S2, S3, and Note) devices - that has been more Teamhacksung (codeworkx, xplodwild, atinm, espenfjo, and others)
This is a heavy contributor to the popularity of Cyanogenmod on their devices. "unbreak all the things", "blame samsung", and "wtf did they do this time?" are common things said by the Samsung device maintainer team in IRC...
Personally - Due to their lack of cooperation with the developer community which lead to CM7 not being the most stable on the devices I owned, in the case of Gingerbread I stuck with maintaining kernels for Touchwizz firmware and porting I9100 firmwares to the I777.
When ICS dropped for the I9100 and it proved to be pretty much a little taste of ICS with nearly everything good about ICS reverted to "gingerbread touchwizzisms" - That pissed off a lot of people, and combined with months of lessons about what really was and wasn't different betwen I777 and I9100, led to CM9 and other AOSP-based firmwares becoming VERY popular on the I777, and quite popular on the I9100 too.
Steve working for Samsung has had almost zero benefit to the CM project - he is HEAVILY firewalled/NDAed.
Samsung becoming the most-ported manufacturer for CM has nothing to do with Steve getting hired - it started long before that.
It has two main components: 1) Samsung has awesome hardware but crap software (this continues to this day), which provides more incentive for people to do a bringup 2) Samsung has the most lenient bootloader-locking policies around, while HTC (the previous king of CM bringups) has shot themselves in the foot with aggressive bootloader-locking policies. Also, LG and Sony are actually way ahead of Samsung in terms of what portion of their product lines have solid CM bringups, it's just they don't get credit for this due to their significantly lower market share. Everyone's noticing the dominance of Samsung compared to HTC and Motorola in terms of CM bringups - this has nothing to do with Steve working for them and everything to do with HTC moving to heavy bootloader locking and Motorola staying with it, which pisses people off.
A smaller contributor is that their flagship devices have a fairly decent amount of hardware similarity. The international Galaxy Note (GT-N7000) was (and still is) built off of the GT-I9100 kernel source tree, and recycles mostly blobs from the I9100. The GT-I9300 has enough similarities to the I9100 that it was easymode for codeworkx and xplodwild - Steve had ZERO involvement in the I9300 bringup. Its rapid bringup is all due to codeworkx/xplodwild having a long history of fixing Samsung breakage and the fully unlocked bootloader, with a little bit of the fact that a lot of I9300 stuff showed up in the I9100 ICS kernel source code drop.
Remember - Cyanogenmod is a volunteer project. What devices get ported really depends on which devices are attractive to developers and not what Steve would like, and without providing any assistance to the development community, Samsung's bootloader policy alone is enough to put them way ahead of the pack. (And seriously - as a Cyanogenmod co-maintainer of two devices, the SGH-I777 and GT-N7000, I can tell you that we got ZERO help from Samsung in any way on either of these devices, and have frequently been fighting their noncooperation with the developer community, such as having to spend an entire day reverse engineering the I777's stupid microphone swapping and quite a bit of time reverse engineering their breakage of gps.h by adding an extra field to the SV status structures in their implementation.)
The general perception within the Android community of Samsung is "Awesome hardware, crap software".
Samsung's profit levels show that they have enough hardware differentiation to avoid razor-thin hardware margins, although the Galaxy S III may be a change... The S3 offers little hardware-wise that the Galaxy Note doesn't (the extra two CPU cores are rarely used) - all it has to offer are a bunch of software gimmicks that so far tend to piss people off that use them.
If Samsung tries to shift focus from hardware to software, they are going to fail on a grand scale...
Nothing, unless you're in a "race series" that only permits beat-up two decade old Toyota Hiluxes and various tanks and other armored vehicles.
I racked up a shit-ton of score in most games by capturing checkpoints in capture-and-hold games because I could accelerate 3-4 times as fast as any one else in a pickup truck, go twice as fast, and brake twice as effectively.
I never got the suspension tuned right though... it was REALLY easy to flip.
Not a single person ever noticed that my vehicle's AA cannon (when driving the mobile AA vehicle) could shoot downwards.
This is why I never purchased Crysis 2 and likely won't purchase Crysis 3.
The single player game was gorgeous, and the graphics were stunning.
The game had enormous multiplayer potential, but - For all their expertise in making a graphics engine, they didn't know jack shit about networked multiplayer.
If a player shot a pistol at another player, take a guess where the decision on amount of damage done was made? You'd think that after years of online gaming, it would be the correct answer: The server.
You'd be wrong - The damage calculations were done BY THE CLIENT. Both offensive (weapon damage) and defensive (armor effectiveness) calculations were done on the client. Weapon damage calculations were done by the client of the player firing the weapon, armor calcs (esp. for vehicles) were done by the client of the player being shot at.
The XML files in which weapon and armor attributes were stored weren't integrity checked at all.
As a result, it was dead easy to change an XML file, eliminate all bullet spread/variation from a pistol, and declare each bullet as doing 99999 damage. The client would say to the server, "I hit player Y for 99999 damage" and the server would believe it, no questions asked!
Similarly, the server would notify the client of a player operating a vehicle, "You were hit by this weapon class for X damage. How much of that was actually absorbed" - For example, most armored vehicles had 80-90% damage reduction from small arms fire. Well, just like the 99999 damage pistol hack, it was easy to declare a 99% (or even 100% I think) damage reduction to any weapons type. So you could easily create an attack helicopter that was immune to everything but controlled flight into terrain... In nearly every game I ever played, a cheater would eventually get access to an attack helicopter, and even if you decided "fuck it, if you can't beat em', join em'" and gave yourself super-rockets - they could fly around the map with impunity.
I actually eventually decided that the most interesting challenge for the game would be to see how far I could modify things without anyone calling me out - and thanks to the blatant cheaters, it was amazing what you could get away with (think 600 horsepower pickup truck, mobile antiaircraft cannon that could depress its turret by 10 degrees below horizontal, etc...) without anyone accusing you at all.
I think I played legitimately for a week, experimented with cheating for a week as an experiment, then deleted the game. It was so insecure as to be utterly pointless - blatant cheaters in every match, and my own experiments showed that there had to be a whole pile of more subtle cheaters lurking.
WP7 is a complete nuke-and-repave compared to WM6.x and previous. Pointing to legacy WM devices as an example of WP7 maturity is a total and epic failure to understand what WP7 is.
WP7 took basically everything that was good about WM6.x and threw it away.
Yeah. If WP7 had been WM6.x with UI improvements - there's a chance I might have considered staying.
The problem is that WP7 threw out everything that was good about WM6.x - Microsoft had a niche with WM6.x in that their operating system appealed to power users and "professional" users.
WP7 phones - They threw out all of the power/professional features and created a toy UI. WP7 phones are basically locked down toys - but if you want a locked down toy, the iPhone does a MUCH better job of that.
Same company, similar names, completely new codebase.
WP7 is a complete nuke and repave - Take WM6.x, throw EVERYTHING out, implement a shiny new UI and don't implement any of the features that actually made WM6.x a decent mobile operating system.
Microsoft basically took everything that was good about Windows Mobile and removed it... Windows Phone 7 is MASSIVELY crippled compared to its predecessor, all it has to offer is a shiny UI.
Oh, you mean "Rigged so Windows Phone will win even when it loses?"
A classic example of why people won't touch WP7 is marketing shenanigans like this - When a manufacturer relies on blatant lies for marketing, why would you trust their product to run your phone?
Let's not forget the fact that nowadays, what really makes a phone useful is not the "as shipped" factory experience, but the applications.
If you want developers, you need to have either: 1) A well established market ecosystem that makes developers want to jump in, even if there are barriers to entry in the market (Apple iOS) 2) Ridiculously low barriers to entry for a new developer that wants to start producing work for your ecosystem (Android)
After decades of Microsoft shenanigans on the desktop, and no evidence of them stopping those shenanigans with mobile - who is going to choose to develop for Windows Phone?
Let's not forget the severe platform limitations WP provides - even now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, Skype on WP7 is horrifically crippled compared to Android and iOS simply due to WP7's fundamental platform limitations. That's impressive considering how bad it is on Android (It's #1 on my battery-draining-apps shitlist.)
This is why I'm giving Samsung's mobile division one more chance before switching to Sony.
Sony's mobile division has been doing GREAT things in terms of cooperating with the open source community and developer relations (they were one of the #1 AOSP contributors last year) - But now that Sony has bought out Ericsson's share of the division, I'm waiting a while longer to see if they devolve back to "more Sony bullshit".
If you don't want to do custom molded - Comply memory foam tips are GREAT. To the original poster - seriously reconsider in-ear headphones with proper tips for comfort.
The stock rubber tips of every in-ear bud I've ever tried were highly uncomfortable and provided poor isolation.
Skullcandy Titans with Complys have proven to be some of the best bang-for-the-buck I've encountered so far. The Complys are a MAJOR (but inexpensive) upgrade in comfort, isolation, and sound quality for any in-ear bud with rubber tips.
Obviously many of the audiophiles will bash Skullcandy - I agree, they aren't the best quality (especially stock) - but they provide what I consider to be very good quality-for-the-dollar especially with one cheap upgrade. Considering your stated requirements of under $50, you don't have many choices.
However, in one place you mentioned a microphone - if you want a microphone, that complicates things. I've had major problems finding any truly comfortable over-the-ear headset with a mic. You definitely won't find it in the under $50 range, except maybe the Logitech folding headphones - but these offer virtually no isolation whatsoever as they're on-ear not over-the-ear.
That's why I'm kind of watching Sony in the days since they purchased Ericsson's share of the joint venture to see where things go... I'm giving Samsung some time to shape up and Sony a bit more time to see if they continue playing nice.
Funny... Those are the exact attitudes from the GNOME team that caused me to ditch it for KDE.
I don't see why people bash the early KDE 4.x releases so much - the KDE team stated from the get-go that they were developer previews and still needed work. Yes, maybe they should have chosen a different version numbering scheme - but it's not their fault that distros took KDE 4.x and packaged it as the default even when the KDE team recommended that people NOT do this.
Android is a perfect example of this - While the userspace Android stack is open source, the Apache license allows vendors to close the source and not release any modifications.
Pretty much all of them do, except for those working on Google's reference devices (the Nexus series).
Now I can understand closing up your "special sauce" modifications like custom UI skins and additional applications - but these companies close down their HALs and frequently change their HAL interfaces so they differ from the Android standards, making it difficult for those who want to run pure AOSP on a non-Nexus device to do so. There is no benefit to doing this - it only pisses people off if they are unhappy with your skin but are unable to change it.
Samsung is especially bad in this regard - they will find every excuse they can to avoid providing source. For example: The wifi drivers for the ath6k chip in the Tab 7.0 Plus and Tab 7.7 are apparently dual-licensed (BSD/GPL) by Atheros. Samsung chose BSD - so as a result owners of those devices are stuck with shitty wifi that doesn't work well and can't be fixed. AT&T released an OTA update to Gingerbread for the Samsung Infuse. Two weeks later, Samsung still had not provided kernel source in compliance with the GPL. At this point, AT&T stopped providing the update due to issues with the touchscreen drivers. A week later, Samsung claimed they did not need to provide source for that release because the update was no longer being provided. This is in conflict with the GPL - Samsung DID provide binaries officially to many users, and they are legally obligated to provide source to those users.
In a manner HIGHLY atypical for them given their corporate history, Sony seems to be the only company in the Android ecosystem that isn't paying lip service to open source. They provided ICS alphas and betas (INCLUDING kernel source) to the community, have provided technical documentation and assistance to the Cyanogenmod team that has been greatly instrumental in bringup of Cyanogenmod on Sony devices, have open-sourced their sensor HAL even when they didn't have to, and actually have a developer relations guy (Karl-Johan Dahlström) that does his job. (As opposed to Samsung's developer relations guy, who just cross-posts to XDA teasing of "awesome things to come" and completely failing to deliver, and tweeting source code release announcements for source code releases that have already been out for a week or more.) It's enough that there's a good chance my next phone will be a Sony despite a historical hatred of them for their past bad behavior in other business areas.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, despite their claims of supporting Linux on ARM, their Tegra open source support is piss-poor compared to TI's OMAP4 support.
Their mainline cpuidle support is still shit. They also have not published any TRM whatsoever for the chip, unlike TI who provides a comprehensive OMAP4 TRM.
Hell - they're so diverged from mainline that products running ICS are still running 2.6.39 kernels unlike 3.0.8 which is the official standard for Android devices running ICS.
Same thing with TI's OMAP TRMs - They provide DETAILED technical documentation without giving away any major secrets about how their stuff actually works.
"Are the Samsungs equally good at resisting falls?" - Because of their light weight and the superior strength-to-weight ratio of plastics, Samsungs have traditionally smoked Apple in drop tests.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elKxgsrJFhw
I have a Note (the real international one, the N7000, not AT&T's mutated version) and love it. I would have major issues if I were to ever return to a smaller phone. My Galaxy S II (which has a monster 4.3" screen compared to the iPhone) feels like a tiny little toy now.
Like you, due to how thin the device is, it fits in my pockets without any issue at all. I don't use the stylus that much, but the big screen is wonderful.
Yeah, Slashdot being a little too US-Centric this time.
This is announcing the launch of the carrier-crippled mutant derpbeasts, not the real I9300.
One thing - To give him credit, he's had a lot of influence in bringing up CM on carrier-mangled derpbeasts like the AT&T Note (completely different from the international version), the T989, and the Shitrocket. (All three of which share a lot of commonality internally).
He hasn't had much involvement at all with the bringups of CM on Hummingbird (all of the original GalaxyS line) or Exynos (international S2, S3, and Note) devices - that has been more Teamhacksung (codeworkx, xplodwild, atinm, espenfjo, and others)
This is a heavy contributor to the popularity of Cyanogenmod on their devices. "unbreak all the things", "blame samsung", and "wtf did they do this time?" are common things said by the Samsung device maintainer team in IRC...
Personally - Due to their lack of cooperation with the developer community which lead to CM7 not being the most stable on the devices I owned, in the case of Gingerbread I stuck with maintaining kernels for Touchwizz firmware and porting I9100 firmwares to the I777.
When ICS dropped for the I9100 and it proved to be pretty much a little taste of ICS with nearly everything good about ICS reverted to "gingerbread touchwizzisms" - That pissed off a lot of people, and combined with months of lessons about what really was and wasn't different betwen I777 and I9100, led to CM9 and other AOSP-based firmwares becoming VERY popular on the I777, and quite popular on the I9100 too.
Yeah... But his CM activities and his activities as a Samsung employee are pretty heavily separated.
Steve working for Samsung has had almost zero benefit to the CM project - he is HEAVILY firewalled/NDAed.
Samsung becoming the most-ported manufacturer for CM has nothing to do with Steve getting hired - it started long before that.
It has two main components:
1) Samsung has awesome hardware but crap software (this continues to this day), which provides more incentive for people to do a bringup
2) Samsung has the most lenient bootloader-locking policies around, while HTC (the previous king of CM bringups) has shot themselves in the foot with aggressive bootloader-locking policies. Also, LG and Sony are actually way ahead of Samsung in terms of what portion of their product lines have solid CM bringups, it's just they don't get credit for this due to their significantly lower market share. Everyone's noticing the dominance of Samsung compared to HTC and Motorola in terms of CM bringups - this has nothing to do with Steve working for them and everything to do with HTC moving to heavy bootloader locking and Motorola staying with it, which pisses people off.
A smaller contributor is that their flagship devices have a fairly decent amount of hardware similarity. The international Galaxy Note (GT-N7000) was (and still is) built off of the GT-I9100 kernel source tree, and recycles mostly blobs from the I9100. The GT-I9300 has enough similarities to the I9100 that it was easymode for codeworkx and xplodwild - Steve had ZERO involvement in the I9300 bringup. Its rapid bringup is all due to codeworkx/xplodwild having a long history of fixing Samsung breakage and the fully unlocked bootloader, with a little bit of the fact that a lot of I9300 stuff showed up in the I9100 ICS kernel source code drop.
Remember - Cyanogenmod is a volunteer project. What devices get ported really depends on which devices are attractive to developers and not what Steve would like, and without providing any assistance to the development community, Samsung's bootloader policy alone is enough to put them way ahead of the pack. (And seriously - as a Cyanogenmod co-maintainer of two devices, the SGH-I777 and GT-N7000, I can tell you that we got ZERO help from Samsung in any way on either of these devices, and have frequently been fighting their noncooperation with the developer community, such as having to spend an entire day reverse engineering the I777's stupid microphone swapping and quite a bit of time reverse engineering their breakage of gps.h by adding an extra field to the SV status structures in their implementation.)
The general perception within the Android community of Samsung is "Awesome hardware, crap software".
Samsung's profit levels show that they have enough hardware differentiation to avoid razor-thin hardware margins, although the Galaxy S III may be a change... The S3 offers little hardware-wise that the Galaxy Note doesn't (the extra two CPU cores are rarely used) - all it has to offer are a bunch of software gimmicks that so far tend to piss people off that use them.
If Samsung tries to shift focus from hardware to software, they are going to fail on a grand scale...
Oh, they didn't fix their shit for Crysis 2?
Nothing, unless you're in a "race series" that only permits beat-up two decade old Toyota Hiluxes and various tanks and other armored vehicles.
I racked up a shit-ton of score in most games by capturing checkpoints in capture-and-hold games because I could accelerate 3-4 times as fast as any one else in a pickup truck, go twice as fast, and brake twice as effectively.
I never got the suspension tuned right though... it was REALLY easy to flip.
Not a single person ever noticed that my vehicle's AA cannon (when driving the mobile AA vehicle) could shoot downwards.
This is why I never purchased Crysis 2 and likely won't purchase Crysis 3.
The single player game was gorgeous, and the graphics were stunning.
The game had enormous multiplayer potential, but - For all their expertise in making a graphics engine, they didn't know jack shit about networked multiplayer.
If a player shot a pistol at another player, take a guess where the decision on amount of damage done was made? You'd think that after years of online gaming, it would be the correct answer: The server.
You'd be wrong - The damage calculations were done BY THE CLIENT. Both offensive (weapon damage) and defensive (armor effectiveness) calculations were done on the client. Weapon damage calculations were done by the client of the player firing the weapon, armor calcs (esp. for vehicles) were done by the client of the player being shot at.
The XML files in which weapon and armor attributes were stored weren't integrity checked at all.
As a result, it was dead easy to change an XML file, eliminate all bullet spread/variation from a pistol, and declare each bullet as doing 99999 damage. The client would say to the server, "I hit player Y for 99999 damage" and the server would believe it, no questions asked!
Similarly, the server would notify the client of a player operating a vehicle, "You were hit by this weapon class for X damage. How much of that was actually absorbed" - For example, most armored vehicles had 80-90% damage reduction from small arms fire. Well, just like the 99999 damage pistol hack, it was easy to declare a 99% (or even 100% I think) damage reduction to any weapons type. So you could easily create an attack helicopter that was immune to everything but controlled flight into terrain... In nearly every game I ever played, a cheater would eventually get access to an attack helicopter, and even if you decided "fuck it, if you can't beat em', join em'" and gave yourself super-rockets - they could fly around the map with impunity.
I actually eventually decided that the most interesting challenge for the game would be to see how far I could modify things without anyone calling me out - and thanks to the blatant cheaters, it was amazing what you could get away with (think 600 horsepower pickup truck, mobile antiaircraft cannon that could depress its turret by 10 degrees below horizontal, etc...) without anyone accusing you at all.
I think I played legitimately for a week, experimented with cheating for a week as an experiment, then deleted the game. It was so insecure as to be utterly pointless - blatant cheaters in every match, and my own experiments showed that there had to be a whole pile of more subtle cheaters lurking.
WP7 is a complete nuke-and-repave compared to WM6.x and previous. Pointing to legacy WM devices as an example of WP7 maturity is a total and epic failure to understand what WP7 is.
WP7 took basically everything that was good about WM6.x and threw it away.
Yeah. If WP7 had been WM6.x with UI improvements - there's a chance I might have considered staying.
The problem is that WP7 threw out everything that was good about WM6.x - Microsoft had a niche with WM6.x in that their operating system appealed to power users and "professional" users.
WP7 phones - They threw out all of the power/professional features and created a toy UI. WP7 phones are basically locked down toys - but if you want a locked down toy, the iPhone does a MUCH better job of that.
Same company, similar names, completely new codebase.
WP7 is a complete nuke and repave - Take WM6.x, throw EVERYTHING out, implement a shiny new UI and don't implement any of the features that actually made WM6.x a decent mobile operating system.
That's true...
Microsoft basically took everything that was good about Windows Mobile and removed it... Windows Phone 7 is MASSIVELY crippled compared to its predecessor, all it has to offer is a shiny UI.
Oh, you mean "Rigged so Windows Phone will win even when it loses?"
A classic example of why people won't touch WP7 is marketing shenanigans like this - When a manufacturer relies on blatant lies for marketing, why would you trust their product to run your phone?
Let's not forget the fact that nowadays, what really makes a phone useful is not the "as shipped" factory experience, but the applications.
If you want developers, you need to have either:
1) A well established market ecosystem that makes developers want to jump in, even if there are barriers to entry in the market (Apple iOS)
2) Ridiculously low barriers to entry for a new developer that wants to start producing work for your ecosystem (Android)
Microsoft doesn't have either - They have barriers of entry on par with iOS for developers, but they don't have the market share/ecosystem to entice developers. Not only that, but they seem to enjoy screwing over what loyal developers they may have - http://www.xda-developers.com/feature/enjoying-chevron-say-goodbye-to-your-developer-unlock/
After decades of Microsoft shenanigans on the desktop, and no evidence of them stopping those shenanigans with mobile - who is going to choose to develop for Windows Phone?
Let's not forget the severe platform limitations WP provides - even now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, Skype on WP7 is horrifically crippled compared to Android and iOS simply due to WP7's fundamental platform limitations. That's impressive considering how bad it is on Android (It's #1 on my battery-draining-apps shitlist.)
This is why I'm giving Samsung's mobile division one more chance before switching to Sony.
Sony's mobile division has been doing GREAT things in terms of cooperating with the open source community and developer relations (they were one of the #1 AOSP contributors last year) - But now that Sony has bought out Ericsson's share of the division, I'm waiting a while longer to see if they devolve back to "more Sony bullshit".
JVC Marshmallows are surprisingly good especially considering their cost.
The only thing I've found to be a step up from them are higher-end buds upgraded with Comply foam eartips.
Foam eartips are an absolute must...
If you don't want to do custom molded - Comply memory foam tips are GREAT. To the original poster - seriously reconsider in-ear headphones with proper tips for comfort.
http://www.complyfoam.com/
The stock rubber tips of every in-ear bud I've ever tried were highly uncomfortable and provided poor isolation.
Skullcandy Titans with Complys have proven to be some of the best bang-for-the-buck I've encountered so far. The Complys are a MAJOR (but inexpensive) upgrade in comfort, isolation, and sound quality for any in-ear bud with rubber tips.
Obviously many of the audiophiles will bash Skullcandy - I agree, they aren't the best quality (especially stock) - but they provide what I consider to be very good quality-for-the-dollar especially with one cheap upgrade. Considering your stated requirements of under $50, you don't have many choices.
However, in one place you mentioned a microphone - if you want a microphone, that complicates things. I've had major problems finding any truly comfortable over-the-ear headset with a mic. You definitely won't find it in the under $50 range, except maybe the Logitech folding headphones - but these offer virtually no isolation whatsoever as they're on-ear not over-the-ear.
That's why I'm kind of watching Sony in the days since they purchased Ericsson's share of the joint venture to see where things go... I'm giving Samsung some time to shape up and Sony a bit more time to see if they continue playing nice.
Funny... Those are the exact attitudes from the GNOME team that caused me to ditch it for KDE.
I don't see why people bash the early KDE 4.x releases so much - the KDE team stated from the get-go that they were developer previews and still needed work. Yes, maybe they should have chosen a different version numbering scheme - but it's not their fault that distros took KDE 4.x and packaged it as the default even when the KDE team recommended that people NOT do this.
Android is a perfect example of this - While the userspace Android stack is open source, the Apache license allows vendors to close the source and not release any modifications.
Pretty much all of them do, except for those working on Google's reference devices (the Nexus series).
Now I can understand closing up your "special sauce" modifications like custom UI skins and additional applications - but these companies close down their HALs and frequently change their HAL interfaces so they differ from the Android standards, making it difficult for those who want to run pure AOSP on a non-Nexus device to do so. There is no benefit to doing this - it only pisses people off if they are unhappy with your skin but are unable to change it.
Samsung is especially bad in this regard - they will find every excuse they can to avoid providing source. For example:
The wifi drivers for the ath6k chip in the Tab 7.0 Plus and Tab 7.7 are apparently dual-licensed (BSD/GPL) by Atheros. Samsung chose BSD - so as a result owners of those devices are stuck with shitty wifi that doesn't work well and can't be fixed.
AT&T released an OTA update to Gingerbread for the Samsung Infuse. Two weeks later, Samsung still had not provided kernel source in compliance with the GPL. At this point, AT&T stopped providing the update due to issues with the touchscreen drivers. A week later, Samsung claimed they did not need to provide source for that release because the update was no longer being provided. This is in conflict with the GPL - Samsung DID provide binaries officially to many users, and they are legally obligated to provide source to those users.
In a manner HIGHLY atypical for them given their corporate history, Sony seems to be the only company in the Android ecosystem that isn't paying lip service to open source. They provided ICS alphas and betas (INCLUDING kernel source) to the community, have provided technical documentation and assistance to the Cyanogenmod team that has been greatly instrumental in bringup of Cyanogenmod on Sony devices, have open-sourced their sensor HAL even when they didn't have to, and actually have a developer relations guy (Karl-Johan Dahlström) that does his job. (As opposed to Samsung's developer relations guy, who just cross-posts to XDA teasing of "awesome things to come" and completely failing to deliver, and tweeting source code release announcements for source code releases that have already been out for a week or more.) It's enough that there's a good chance my next phone will be a Sony despite a historical hatred of them for their past bad behavior in other business areas.