Engadget: Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision?

I would say that it’s a good article to read, but to be honest, I can already answer the question as the wireless industry has been lamented on this blog many times over: yes.

Carriers can destroy a wet dream without even trying… when they try to make things “better for the customer” you can be sure that they are attempting to increase their profits at the expense for the customer. Trust me. Android is in the same came that Windows Mobile was, and WM followed J2ME which had already followed BREW. This is one of the things that I will praise Apple for, over and over again: they told AT&T no to every little forced integration that AT&T wanted – AT&T is free to put their apps in the App Store (and they do – 5 apps at last count) but they aren’t allowed to junk up the phone out of the box.

It’ll be interesting to see if Windows Phone has learned from the mistakes of Android, WM, J2ME, and BREW – looking forward to seeing how that works out.

Gizmodo: The Google Phone could be a ploy to upset the wireless industry, or it could be an expensive niche device. Either way, it’d be a bid to take Android back from the companies that seem hell-bent on destroying it. Android’s most serious problem right now is fragmentation: with each new phone, it seems, comes a different version of the OS. In theory, these differences are superficial, and come down to handset manufacturers’ and carriers’ custom interfaces, which sit atop a mostly unchanged Android core. In practice, it’s much worse.

Welcome to the troubling world of Windows Mobile.
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