Written by mkskeith on Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Is The Backflip An Android Device Or An AT&T Device?


att android

Apparently that is still up in the air since AT&T slaughtered the Motorola Backflip… and if you think new-cell-phones.org is opinionated, check out this post over at xda-developers.  Apparently AT&T has changed the default search provider from the obvious Google choice to Yahoo.  Yahoo on a Google device?  There also is no chance of using Google Maps as it has been overridden, too.  You can pay for AT&T Navigator, though.  There is also no voice search and you can’t install applications from non trusted sources, meaning your SD card or those downloaded from the web and from your WIFI at home.

AT&T is also apparently the same carrier that won’t allow you to tell your Java apps NOT to ask for permission more than once.  Now I finally know who to blame for my wife’s Blackberry always needing permissions to do everything over and over again.  Luckily you can always choose to unlock it, for a fee usually.  I have always been a little skeptical of locked devices so I tend to buy unlocked ones which is easier on a GSM carrier due to just swapping SIM cards.

So what irks you the most about carriers here in the US?  Is AT&T within their rights or are they butchering Android?

What do you like about them that you are willing to put up with this sort of stuff for?  Drop a comment and let us know your thoughts.

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Chris Spera
Mar 17, 2010

GREAT editorial.

I think they ruined the device. There’s no reason why they had to limit downloads to just the AT&T Store or the Android Market (is the Android Market even allowed??). This is just a ploy for AT&T to make money. Most of their software is CRAP, and I wouldn’t use any of that stuff if my life depended on it.

They have a nasty habit of assuming that I am going to want to use their software. I don’t, and never will want to. The problem is that the software is clunky, poorly implemented, and in some cases, buggy. They never had anything that I wanted to use over and above other 3rd party apps that were available. The apps that were there never got executed and just took up space on the device and were a waste, IMHO.

While implementing Yahoo on an Android device seems silly, the end user likely isn’t going to care. If they can switch to Google, and want it, they will. If not, they are likely going to get the same search results as they would on the search engine of their choice, so what does it matter..? Not much (to them), I’d assume.

At the end of the day, though, I think that AT&T took a decent device that was locked down enough as it is (MotoBLUR is behind by 3-4 Android OS versions, and will be until Moto decides to allow it past them), and just made it worse.

Interesting form factor, but not so much with the restrictions and AT&T-ness. This will unfortunately not sell well, and AT&T will not be as quick (..I know… QUICK?!?) to release another Android device.

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