Sorry to those who will complain about me 'resurrecting' an older post, and sorry to those who object to other people having an opinion of their own (why do I see a Canadian flag in my mind when I type that?) and sorry to those who think Fascinate owners should just bend over, I don't agree with any of you...........so, deal with it!
Now, onto the Dad-Bill's question as to what input or influence, if any, Google may have regarding the release of Froyo for the Fascinate.
To start, I will go back to 1983 cos thats when my 'experience' in IT begins, and it's this 'experience' that shapes my opinon. When Microsoft first started pushing out their DOS (not known as MSDOS originally) it was similar to Google pushing out Android, they wrote the 'source' and others tweaked it to fit their hardware. Microsoft did not deal in hardware, they left that to others and so we had other manufacturers - IBM notably as the original MS 'customer' - who built the hardware tweaked the OS and introduced us to the 'Personal Computer'.
It wasn't long before other electronics manufacturers realised the potential market for PC's and dived headlong into the business of making PC 'clones' around the time that MS released DOS 2.0 now begining to be known as MSDOS, 2.1 and 2.2 followed soon after. By now there was a fairly large number of manufacturers selling PC's - Sanyo, Wyse, Hyundai, Silver Reed, to name a few (forgive my memory if I miss your particular favourite) they all ran 'MSDOS' but, and it's a big but, they all ran their own 'tweaked' version of MSDOS. Microsoft didn't write a different version of MSDOS for every different model PC that was being sold, that was left to the manufacturer so we had MSDOS for SANYO, MSDOS for Wyse, MSDOS for Hyundai, etc etc. Microsoft licensed the manufacturer to 'tweak' the OS as necessary to fit their hardware. Yes Microsoft had input, but basically, if you built hardware that would run a version of MSDOS and you had the license from Microsoft, then you did what was necessary to make it work.
We all know what happened over the next 25 years - MSDOS reached Ver 4.x and Windows took over. During that time IBM tried to compete in the OS market with their own 'PCDOS'. We had CPM and eventually Apple, and now we have basically Windows and Apple. Here endeth the history lesson (if you disagree with my version of events then thats your right, I don't really care. Like I said at the begining, I'm basing this on MY experience, not yours!).
So, here's my opinion :
Google are following Microsofts original model (albeit an accelerated version), they developed Android and licensed manufacturers and, in the USA at least (*** more below), service providors, to allow them to 'tweak' the OS to meet their specific hardware and 'system' requirements. As recent reports suggest, Google will soon tighten their hold on Android by limiting the extent to which they will alow manufacturers to 'tweak'. Those limitations will increase untill Android will be no more 'open source' than Microsoft Windows, if you want to run Android on your hardware then it will be up to you to build the hardware so that it's architecture meets Googles specs. It's a simple, but very efficient, business plan. Develop a product that you can basically 'give away', a 'loss-leader'. Keep improving the product untill you have built a large enough 'loyal' consumer-base, then tighten the screws so that only you can supply that market. With Android, Google's pay-off comes when they have complete control over what you can have on your Android phone and everyone who wants to sell an App to run on that phone gives Google a slice of their particular cake, every search, every route planned through GPS, every bit of media downloaded, comes from Google (yeayyyy no more V-cast). I am certain that Google knew long before anyone else that Verizon would pull their "we want to use Bing so we can get money from Microsoft" stunt, and it's things like that that give Google the perfect excuse (if they needed any) for tightening their hold over the future of Android.
So, what was I saying? My opinion, yes! In my opinion, Google have absolutely nothing to do with the delay Fascinate users are experiencing getting Froyo, it is entirely Samsung and Verizon who have dropped the ball, but mostly Verizon (see *** below).
*** Outside of the US much tighter consumer protection laws prevented service providors from loading their phones with 'bloatware' the way Verizon have done with their phones - and the Fascinate is the phone with the most bloatware of all (I class Bing as bloatware cos it's useless as a search engine). This restriction on service providors in the rest of the world has resulted in a more 'vanilla' Android experience across the board and as a result of that, the fascinate 'out there' is now getting Gingerbread while we still wait for Froyo. Those of you who argue that the Verizon Fascinate is different because we use CDMA and the rest of the world uses GSM, well, thats a load of poopy. The difference between a phone that uses CDMA and a phone that uses GSM is very limited and dealt with mostly (if not 100%) by hardware not by the OS. Once the radio signal has been retrieved from the ether by the antenna and translated into 0's and 1's the difference between CDMA and GSM is zero (same in reverse)
Once again, this is all my opinion based on my experience, agree or disagree as you please, that's your right, just as it's my right to whinge and moan, complain, wine, shout, cry, or whatever I want, about not getting the OS upgarde I was promised when I bought my fascinate.
