At the big three carriers here in Canada you can't buy an Android phone for more than $150 unless you pay an unsubsidized price off contract. And that $150 is only at one carrier, the other two max at $100 (Atrix and Galaxy S for instance). And you can get them for as little as $0 advertised with a number of models at $75, $50 and $25-29.

There are plenty of other phones also available for $0 advertised. Most of those semi-smart and feature phones will in time all migrate over to Android, I'm pretty confident of that.

I've seen first hand at a number of phone kiosks people asking about "that iPhone" but not liking the price or contracts, only to be told by the sales person they could get this similar phone for $50 or this other one for $20 instead. I don't doubt for a second that Android handsets will continue to increase their lead in units, but they're already at the commodity level now. There's nothing premium about Android in general, and it's few handsets running Android that are premium product in their own right.

The problem with this mix of handsets at these manufacturers is product lifecycle and longevity. You're looking at anywhere from a few short months to 18 months tops for any hand set. Didn't we just hear recently that the software update lifecycle is supposed to be 18 months? Was it at Google IO?

The situation Matt had with his client isn't likely to change because of all this. It's why I brought this up in the first place. The race to differentiate and the short lifecycle of the Android products pretty much insures incompatibility and that problems will not be resolved, even long-term.