[Verizon Droid Incredible 2] litetaker:
Oh, you underestimate Satan.

VZW is but a pawn of Satan. The difference between VZW and Satan is VZW may have some good in it. But not Satan. No. Never. And since VZW is merely a pawn, it must obey Satan. So, in conclusion, Satan may very well be the guy who is screwing up our OTA. Not VZW's fault. It merely signed a deal, albeit blindly, for eternal radiowave domination in return for eternal servitude and poor customer service and network quality... (Lewis Black style:) "Aaaannd high prices, aaand high prices for ALL!"

---------- Post added at 11:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:03 AM ----------

You thoroughly misunderstand how Linux and Windows work.

Linux is open source. You therefore can tinker and replace any part. Kernel is a part of the whole thing we call the OS... Kernel is the MOST important thing. It has the code necessary to interface with the device. If you wanna write a piece of code to access the SD-card, the kernel has modules or drivers to let you do that... It therefore abstracts the underlying hardware. Windows has a "kernel" of sorts that works with MOST PC's because MOST PC's comply with the standards and also MS puts a lot of effort to make sure almost all the common hardware types have some form of support in their "kernel". of course, some things don't... and here is where the vendor support kicks in. The vendors, say HP, Dell etc. make drivers to run with Windows. They then sell it... That is why Windows works with any PC...

Now, come to Android. Android is again similar to what happens in Windows. the problem is when you update android from say GB to ICS, the way the OS components try to interact with the hardware changes.. they need different form of interface to make it work. that change should come in the kernel. Even in Windows you have this problem. Specifically if you bought a PC long ago that came with XP, you would have had problems with Vista as it may not have recognized some devices and vendors were still rushing to make drivers... the problem was more pronounced coming from 32-bit windows to 64-bit. Same thing with Android. GB and ICS are very different. And an added problem with android is many of the underlying components are not as open as PC. PC's use standard graphics cards, memories and such. Android uses graphics cards, memories and all that are intended for a particular type of embedded devices.. Hence there is no need for the makers of those devices to openly distribute the "modules" or drivers. They need to do it for the PC as anyone can use that component and so for them to be able to use it, they need to release a binary of the driver (see Nvidia with its drivers for the various gfx cards)..

But on the other hand, taking Nvidia as an example, they don't release modules for the Tegra platform to anyone other than their partners... soooo same thing with say the Dinc2. So, we need to wait for the kernel to be able to see what changes are made and incorporate them..

I may have oversimplified some things and may be misunderstood some details myself, but this is definitely the gist of it - give and take some minor detail errors...

Hence the crux of the matter is, you can't simply reverse engineer the kernel for one device from another. Each device uses some different components, (much like in the PC world) and it is upto the vendor of that component to provide drivers (again like in PC). However, in PC world, vendors readily give a binary to support those components on any PC. Here, on android they don't. It is upto HTC to partner with its vendors to get said drivers and incorporate it into a kernel and then make it work... SOOOO that is why kernels from similar devices (like the Chinese Dinc2 or the Inc S) work to a great extent with our device. But you can't expect Google to be able to partner with ALL vendors to make a universal kernel. I believe neither does MS... MS is lucky as Windows is SOOO popular and is on a more open platform (PC) that all vendors have supported the products openly.. Android is opensource, but platform and hardware wise, it is very closedsource... :(

I wanna see if some dev can concur with me... Just to lemme know I was not totally talking outta my ass! :D :p