[Galaxy S III General] qwerty12:
No. The Nexus series of phones will never have a microSD slot 'cause Google do not think they're needed (along with file managers - with the Android trait of leaving leftover **** on the SD when uninstalling applications, yeah right). Despite already nearly filling up both my 16GB internal + 32GB microSD card, I'd - grudgingly - live with the loss of a microSD card slot but rumours say that the memory of the new LG Nexus is either 8GB/16GB in order to push Google's **** cloud services. Not only do I feel it's more futuristic that I can carry huge amounts of files on a tiny microSD card without having to be tied to the Internet, Google Music doesn't officially work this side of the pond and even if it did I don't have the data allowance to always be streaming - and, in my case, I don't get mobile phone signal for a couple hours a day...

LG have been told to make the next Nexus. Luckily, I never bought the useless doorstop known as the Optimus 2X, but ask around and owners will generally tell you it sucks thanks to its feature of randomly rebooting throughout your day, on the stock firmware doing nothing. LG Canada also said no to ICS for the phone - we're talking about the first Android dual-core phone and LG's flagship. Thankfully, Google will be operating the update side of things so this won't be an issue with the Nexus, but I'll be damned if I ever buy an LG phone (4x has a locked bootloader, for example. Again not a problem on the Nexus, but another reason why I'll never consider LG).

I want to (well, try to) punch a wall when I say this, but odds are I'll be getting a Sony phone when they release a phone with specs worthy of the month of the year they're announcing it in. (In short, I want a quad-core, Sony, not excitement over the fact that the T is - finally - your first dual-core) I'll never forgive them for the Vita but with phones, they seem to have it right so no point in cutting my nose off in order to spite my face. Everybody knows of Code Aurora, but Sony do release binaries for those things they don't/can't open the source of to make it easier for those who want to run AOSP-based ROMs, unlocking the bootloader can be done through a website of theirs (and there's no bollocks like S-ON to deal with), Entropy512 says they release the code of some of their own things that they don't need to - nothing groundbreaking but very helpful to AOSP ROM maintainers etc. and they've posted on XDA in order to promote their open-source software to help developers (there's a post from a Sony Ericsson employee somewhere on XDA talking about their program that wraps apktool and others to for a better decompiling experience... god I sound like a shill).

I've also seen them contribute fixes to upstream software. Take D-Bus. On a GNU/Linux desktop it's an open-source program used mainly by the KDE & GNOME desktops (and by a ton of freedesktop.org programs like the upower daemon) as a way for programs to communicate with each other. (Sorry for the awful attempt at an explanation) On Android it's there too, probably because BlueZ, which provides the Bluetooth stack, needs it. Applications can't use it on Android but if dbus-daemon is happy then BlueZ is too. On the DBus mailing list, I would see posts by Sony Ericsson employees working on Android trying to find out why X operation was slow and, in some cases, providing fixes themselves. This is a great approach as it means not only DBus-using Linux desktops get a more stable piece of software because Sony chose to submit directly to the people who wrote the the program, it also means that other Android phones that run the version of dbus-daemon with Sony's fixes also benefit. JBQ of Google also put the Arc S device tree into AOSP - the first non-Nexus phone - because (if I'm remembering right) Sony were always friendly to AOSP and were contributing.