Well, I'm glad I amuse you. Fortunately I make a pretty nice living raising hell with telecommunications companies.
I understand what you are saying about waiting, but waiting 6-8 months of my nine-month contract to get an update, or not, isn't acceptable to me. And yes, you're right. Soon 2.2 will be out and people will be complaining about that, because, if they are lucky, they will have just got 2.1... 6-8 months late. Personally I will not use the leaked image as I have read all about the bugs and missing features, one of the biggest being that copy-protected apps will not be available from the market, making one of my main reasons for wanting 2.1 moot.
In a perfect world, what I would like to see are software updates done more like the iPhone. Nobody gets it until everyone can get it. This way you don't have to worry about the whole world moving on to 2.1 while you're stuck on 1.5. I understand this may not be feasible with the fragmented market that Android lives in, but some attempt needs to be made to get CLOSE to that.
A more reasonable goal would be for the VZW software engineers to share what they are running into with the approval process. It is an open-source OS, afterall, and doing this wouldn't be completely unheard of.
My goal in "making a stink" isn't necessarily to get VZW to say, "Oh, you want this? Why didn't you say so? We've had it ready for months but were just sitting on it waiting for someone to ask. Here you go!" I'm not that gullible. In my view, I see three acceptable outcomes:
1) Give me some info. Let your customers in on the process a little. Let them understand what is taking so long.
2) Let me out of my contract without an early termination fee.
3) Allow me to get an Incredible for the 2-year contract price and use my Eris as a trade-in.
The first option costs them nothing but a little pride. The second doesn't cost them either, but does void any future revenue from me personally. The third is never going to happen.
Quite frankly I'm surprised at your defeatest attitude that I should simply accept that I signed a contract, and VZW will give it to me when they are good and ready, if they feel like it, like it is some kind of gift. If this was a regular cellphone I'd agree, but this is a smartphone that if not updated in a reasonably timely fashion, will be out of date before I really even started using it, and that is not something I'm willing to sit idlely by and tolerate.
The actual truth of the matter is that the VZW contract doesn't state any of VZW's obligations to you, the customer outside of service availability, but that does not obsolve them of all other responsibility. In fact, one could argue that allowing the software to lag behind means that the services provided by that phone are no longer available or severely limited.
