[EVO 4G General] Award Tour:
iOS is just as bad? Yeah freaking right.

The iPhone 3G was released in what? June 2008 and supports the latest version of iOS. It doesn't support every new feature but should we expect a 2+ year old phone to support the latest and greatest or should the OS stagnate to accommodate a two year old phone? The original 2G iPhone is THREE+ years old. Again, should the OS stagnate to support a three year old phone? Or should it progress and cut support? That said, how many 2+ year old Android phones EVEN get official updates? Oh yeah, that's right - ZERO. If we go by age of device and total volume, the iPhone is so far ahead of Android in terms on not being fragmented that it isn't even funny. That's the way it is.

And only the hardware is fragmented? What? Let's see, does the EVO have HTC Sense or Android 2.2 or maybe something inbetween? Give a regular, uninformed, mainstream G1 owner a EVO - will he/she have the same experience? I said it in the other thread but OEMs like Android because they can almost mold it into their own OS. They would love to build their own proprietary OS but that's easier said than done. The next best thing is to take open source Android and make it their own by modding the hell out of it. In two years, HTC Sense will probably look and act so different than stock Android (or any other skin which itself will be very different) that you'd be hard press to identity it as a Android phone. And keep this in mind, OEMs like HTC can't make a good proprietary OS for one reason: they don't have the same level of talent that Google (or Apple) has. I've said this countless times but HTC Sense is badly designed and developed, pretty much a dark, slow mashup of Android and iOS. So I'm supposed to be happy about choice when it comes from mediocrity? On top of that, it wont be long before they open their own competing stores either, HTC/Samsung and many others are doing so right now. So soon apps will be fragmented by app stores too? C'mon, son.

That's OEMs but what about carriers? Verizon for one is on a raping spree with Android. How many fragmenting strategies have they signed/implemented lately? Bing on Android? Locked bootloaders that have yet to be cracked? Skype MOBILE (aka 3G calling) still officially exclusive to Verizon Android phones? Opening a VCast Android store that will surely lead to even more fragmenting exclusive deals? Other carriers locking down, stripping away features and then selling it back to you? More third party stores will open, more modifications, more fragmentation. I haven't even included the oh so popular problem of OEMs/carriers inability (or care) to update devices. THIS IS MAINSTREAM ANDROID.

Google is a engineer based company that is directed by calculated decisions. Hell, even small design decisions require a ton of empirical testing to be implemented. You think their talents designers like dull and boring design? Nope, but testing sure does. That's how they do things there. Before Android was released, I can guarantee you that they went to carriers and OEMs to find out what they wanted so that they could get the best Android adoption as possible. That's how all of this came to be, and why Google doesn't care because at the end of day they are willing to sacrifice user experience for more eyeballs on their ads.

Androids only saving grace to it's original vision is the Nexus One, those willing to pirate, great underground devs like Cyanogen and the 1% of users that know enough to take advantage of it.