[General Questions and Answers] kgk888:
I hate the way Apple chooses to lock down their devices with iTunes and the App Store, but I'm equally as frustrated with every damn Android device running proprietary crapware on top of Android. There, I said it.

I mean, the selling point is, or should be, Android. Not Samsung or HTC's poor attempts to create superfluous software that does what Android (2.2 anyway) already does, only worse and laggier. I just started up a new contract on Vodafone (Germany) and got a Galaxy S for 149 Euro. I jailbroke and carrier unlocked my old iPhone 3G (from T-Mobile) and popped in my new Vodafone SIM and I'm probably going to put the Galaxy S on eBay to reap the profit off it while it's still high priced. (our contract phones are not carrier locked)

I mean, yea the iPhone 3G is laggy with iOS4, but with jailbreak it's still overall less frustrating than the Galaxy S has been for me. Google needs to *****slap the manufacturers into installing vanilla Android and vanilla Android ONLY. Let them install their proprietary apps like Samsung App Market (and third party apps like some carriers do). That can all be deleted once they are rooted anyway. It's this annoying ROM juggling that is ruining the Android experience for a lot of people who want to get away from Apple, RIM, Microsoft, etc. The only real option for a vanilla experience for most users right now is the Nexus One, which is no longer produced and to which there will be no successor. Why can't we just be given vanilla, and THEN decide whether we want Swype or Sense, or whatever else?

I'm not trying to slag the Android community, because they are great. And I'm far, far from an Apple "fanboy", it's just the manufacturers that are creating too much differentiation within Android. I mean of course Android will experience differentiation with multiple hardware manufactuers. It's part of being an open platform. The problem is it's exacerbated exponentially by the mountains of crapware shoveled onto each different phone.

That it appears Samsung decided to use an internal SD to run the OS and apps is frustrating as well. All that fantastic hardware paired with a slow internal SD with crap I/O performance is kind of....O_o?! Shouldn't have to buy a class 6-10 microSD and partition it with ext4 just to get the phone running the way it should. Especially with the rest of the hardware being wonderful.

I mean.....maybe this is heresy here, but jailbreaking an iPhone4 and using Cydia, et al, seems to be less of a hassle than rooting and ROMing something like the Galaxy S. At least with the iPhone you don't need to remove third party crapware (although the case can be made for Apple's YouTube app being worthless non-removable third party crapware).

The reason I, co-workers and friends of mine find Android so appealing is the ability to install whatever we want, whenever we want. The ability to circumvent an "App Market" and install a Torrent manager to control torrents at home on the go, or to install third party browsers that may offer better performance/options, or other third party applications that technically "compete" with the native Android apps written by Google.

That's what we find so appealing. What we hate, and what keeps us holding out a little on Android (those of us without Nexus Ones) are the aforementioned problems. If the phones simply came with Vanilla Android or if there were a simple option for reverting the phones to Vanilla Android that didn't involve rooting and hunting around for custom ROMs (which often have their own superfluous crap installed) it would draw people towards the Android platform at an even quicker rate. At least with iOS4 we know what we're getting. With Android devices it's a grab bag of poorly written, superfluous crapware, where the only hope is that you can find a device with the least amount.

What is wrong with simply handing us Android devices with vanilla Android? Is every manufacturer afraid that without them guiding us through the experience with their own interpretation that the commonfolk will get lost in the vast sea of open source Android? I mean it's like the blind leading those with 20/20 vision at this point.

Or is it just greed reaching through trying to somehow claim that loading their devices up with crapware increases their profit margins and compensates for the people they wind up driving or keeping away from Android?

I'm just rambling at this point and need coffee. And a vanilla Android device.