I'd also be happy if the carriers gave you an easy way to turn off their crapware. I have no idea why they think it's better to get their hooks deep into the OS and force you to use their stuff. It's not like the phone will cease to work correctly if I use plain Android. I played with a Galaxy Tab 7" in a retail store the other day for about 20 minutes just to check it out. The thing I find funny is that while nobody will be awarding Android for style, Samsung doesn't seem to realize that their design touches are horribly ugly. Google tends to use all white icons in their menus, but Samsung has ugly, color, clip-art-looking icons all over the place. Yuk.

It makes me wonder why they put their own take on these devices in the first place. I'd always assumed that it was a way for them to differentiate themselves in the mind of an average consumer walking into a phone store and seeing five Android phones in front of them. In fact, it seems the entire purpose of these alternate skins is to immediately signal to the user that it does not look like another company's Android phone.

It's understandable to differentiate, but when it starts hurting your customers, it simply doesn't make sense. You're going to end up with phones that are missing features from newer versions of Android, or even more importantly you miss out on security updates.

I honestly don't understand the manufacturer skinning. I simply can't figure it out. There are tons of alternate launchers in the App Market, and ever since Android 1.5, I've never had one crap out after an update to the OS. So why not simply create, for example, a Sense UI Launcher? They could make the phone default to the company's system applications like their own phone dialer. That way, it's riding on top of an OS that can still get updated.

Anyway, in the end I'm happy about this. Bruno, I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of hypocritical. This is giving up Google wanted to play nice, but they clearly grossly underestimated the manufacturers' ability to f*** everything up for no good reason. I'd be surprised if Google ever foresaw this situation, and if they had they would have come out with a different approach.

I have a hard time seeing this as not being pro-consumer.