"You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably h

"You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant." Clearly there is a lot you don't know about human psychology. Try reading "Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. Gifts, even trivial and unwanted gifts, make people feel obligation to the gift-giver. Face it, whatever Android's merits, Google is leaving nothing to chance by buying a lot of good will with shipping containers worth of expensive gifts. As for your rant about the AT&T relationship's cost to users: If Apple hadn't done that deal, what would the mobile device ecosystem look like today and how would that be for users? Before the iPhone, the carriers were so firmly in control, it was obscene. You think Apple's app store terms are draconian? Try getting in to one of the old mobile application stores. You think Google would have any leverage in the mobile space without the iPhone? Look, AT&T sucks (not that my prior experience with Verizon was great), I'm reminded about that every day when 1/4 of my commute is plagued with slow-ass Internet even though I have a nice strong signal, but your cynicism is giving you selective blindness. I'm reminded of all the "wintel" hate among Linux advocates a decade or so ago. There was a lot to hate, but without the economics of the Microsoft/Intel world, its pretty damn hard to imagine the cheap & powerful computing hardware that made an open source OS anything but a curiosity for academics and a small number of hobbyists.