Gee, I'd kind of liked Samsung because they seemed to focus on delivering good technology at a good price. I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past (perhaps relative to the Japanese tech industry).
This makes it seem like they're hiring Marketers and MBAs who think the best plan is to try to squeeze as much as they can out of their contract customers (the cell carriers) rather than put as much Samsung awesomeness as possible into the hands of actual happy users. Short-term thinking never gets old.
In fairness to Samsung they do incur non-trivial cost doing this.
Imagine this situation Verizon says, "Our Samsung Galaxy S phone must get 2.2" while Sprint says, "No need". Should Sprint have to pay for what Verizon is getting?
The issue is that you're going to pay, whether its Samsung or HTC. Some companies will build the price into the phone, others will price it in some other way (or some companies could eat the cost -- but that's probably not sustainable).
Charging directly to the end user seems like the best way to do it. If I want 2.2, then I should pay for it, and if I'm happy with 2.1 why should I pay for other people to get 2.2? But short of that, charging the carriers makes sense.
The biggest downside I see is that it will shackle Google's ability to move the platform forward. For example 2.3 is reported to include some major improvements for low latency audio. As a game developer how do you handle this? Just ignore this 2.3-only feature and target 2.1? Or do you build a 2.1 and 2.3 version? 2.2? 3.0? 3.1? Unfortunately we're talking about these phones being around for another 2-3 years at minimum so realistically you might be asking a developer to support 2.1 3 years from now? That's going to be a really tough sell. The other issue is security. Leaving all those old versions out there with little or no post-release updating is just begging for trouble. (and let's not forget about bug fixes -- no one wants to suffer 2 years working around an annoying bug. They simply won't buy another Android phone after a bad experience like that)
I'd figured they perceived themselves as something of an underdog in the past
They don't. Samsung is an 800lb Gorilla in the CE space. They are the biggest seller of HDTV's in the US (though Vizio is closing fast) and the second largest manufacturer of cell phones worldwide.
Samsung is also starting to throw its weight around a lot.
Agreed. I like the Epic's form factor and slide-out keyboard (in fact I'm typing this on a Nokia N810, which is almost exactly the same size) and was excited when I saw it announced. I would probably have bought one by now if it had Froyo. But watching Samsung's behavior around this upgrade has turned me off completely.
Maybe with Swype on an Evo I wouldn't miss the physical keyboard.
This makes it seem like they're hiring Marketers and MBAs who think the best plan is to try to squeeze as much as they can out of their contract customers (the cell carriers) rather than put as much Samsung awesomeness as possible into the hands of actual happy users. Short-term thinking never gets old.
Maybe it's time to look at HTC.