A new whitepaper from wireless services firm WDS points out some potential problems for carriers who sell Android smartphones.
The paper, based on analysis of 600,000 support calls to mobile carriers, details some mistakes they have made in selecting, marketing, and updating Android phones.
It concentrates primarily on the effects of hardware and software fragmentation caused by Google's ... [ read the full article ]
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I think Google does need to do something to tighten its control over what gets done to Android handsets. It's bad when you can go buy an Android phone today and 9 months later it is discontinued by the carrier and no longer receives any updates.
I solve that problem by only purchasing a nexus phone. Thing is if there was better support and no added bloatware that I can not uninstall I would have purchased at least one more phone then I have by now.
I am now looking into cyanogenmod to potentially increase my purchasing options on phones.
I hate, hate, hate that when i go to update an app that I do use the Sprint bloatware....that I can't uninstall....automatically updates it's self the minute I enter the market. They not only won't let me uninstall this worthless bullsh*t I NEVER use, they also won't give me the option to stop auto updating. Before these apps just sat there and never really bothered me, other than wasting space on my memory, but the intrusion and disruption they are causing now is just about all i can take. Sprint has pissed me off enough with these bloatware apps that I'm actually thinking about rooting my phone for the first time.
This is funny, as what im reading this as if carries had instead opted for a standard build instead of their overly customised version they wouldn't have had so many issue with RMA and fragmentation wouldn't be as bad.
That said, virtually every one i knows doesn't really care about carrier updates and most root and then flash over a community firmware.
I try and encourage everyone to load cyanogenmod when ever i can, even under clocking my desire by 200mhz it still gets double the score on a bench mark of the original desire with htcs 2.2 rom at full clock, although this is probably mostly due to the gingery goodness at its heart :)
