Surprise: AT&T's First Android Isn't Open → Re: hmmmm....

C'mon. AT&T having the customer-numb balls to put out a locked-down Android HAS TO BE FRONT-PAGE NEWS.

Is this sarcasm Robb? This post seems to contradict your response to sonicmerlin below. AT&T has the choice to whatever it wishes with Android so long as it abides by the license. Admittedly, I know little about Android and the other Android offerings. Don't other Android devices need to be rooted to have full "open" access? Can this device not be rooted?

Yet Verizon's nationwide data outage last week was nowhere to be found on BBR.....

It must have been so bad I didn't that my life stopped .. because for a nationwide outage I heard nothing about it, nor noticed any issue on my Droid, and I use data CONSTANTLY. I do that pretty much to just suck up as much as I can from Verizon.

I'm no mouthpiece for VZ, but my service with them has been far better than the Death Star, not to mention my Droid wasn't locked out like this ... nor is my wife's Droid Eris.

...and I have the choice to point and laugh. It is newsworthy, but I don't think anyone should force anyone to do anything.No, I can load whatever from whatever. It doesn't have to be approved by anyone.

What I don't have out-of-the-box is root access. And while I can get that quite easily, I can understand why these guys don't want to support users who root and then subsequently have problems due to the escalated privileges. There are no applications that require root (for example, I tether on an unrooted phone).

I submitted it as news but Karl didn't post it.

Fair enough...although I don't believe anyone mentioned that this isn't newsworthy.

FWIW, this thread started from the idea that if you don't like the limitations, don't buy the product. No different than many other threads of endless complaining about a limited product/service. Choice is nice.

Yeah interesting huh? I think I was the only one that posted about the incident, and still didn't get but a few responses.

I'm not quite sure what's being inferred here. That we're hard on AT&T and easy on Verizon? That's pretty funny if you've seen how hard we smack Verizon when they make poor decisions. Verizon stories concerning their stubbornness in the face of open wireless evolution also get posted frequently.

The Verizon outage was nowhere to be found because by the time other stories had been written and posted that morning, the outage was resolved.

And, yes, AT&T's first foray into Android being locked down is newsworthy.

Blackberry outages either on Verizon or others has become way to often. This is one reason I dumped my Tour for a Droid. The only app that I had to Superuser my phone for was Wireless Tether. However, wireless tether is still not working correctly on some Droids and only gets 20K up/down.

In the end many who buy a Android phones will modify them. If not already Rooted it will be soon and result in new ROM's.