Now, I enjoy an Apple hardware brainfuck as much as the next, but a phone is never a better phone because of hardware alone, and Google knows this too. Not sur

Now, I enjoy an Apple hardware brainfuck as much as the next, but a phone is never a better phone because of hardware alone, and Google knows this too. Not sure about this... I think in large part the problem with Windows Mobile phones is the driver quality/integration -- a problem that you can't separate from the hardware too far. No one else makes a legitimate phone OS with all this support that can be tweaked down to the very roots. For one thing, I'm excited to be able to download an entirely different version of all of Android’s core applications if I don't like the default 1.0 versions—and that’s every app, everything from the dialer to the contacts manager—something that's technically possible in WinMo but often comes off more as an awkward re-skinning and not a top-down integration. I know the good folks at Google have given this a lot of hard thought, but the fit and finish of those applications is critical to the reliability of the phone as a phone. Software that hook into those interfaces poorly or without good reason risks a lot of reliability for dubious gain. Anyone who used Mac OS pre-X or PalmOS with a lot of extensions knows exactly what I'm talking about. That said, I'm more and more pumped about it as time goes on. The openness can't hurt, even if Apple isn't on board (and likely won't be for years if ever).