Motorola Cliq XT Won’t Get Android 2.1 Upgrade

Gruber is good at this kind of snark, but I think his point backfires in this case.<p>Sure, executing five command line operations and rooting your phone is more of a pain in the ass than doing nothing. But if I was stuck using a Cliq XT as my daily phone (certainly would never happen, but let's just suppose), then I really would be sitting there saying, in earnest and without irony, "Well, luckily Android is 'open' and I can fix this."<p>But I'm not actually sure if rooting and upgrading your Cliq XT is really that easy, or if Gruber is just taking Andy Rubin's tweet out of context to make today's snarky little if-technologically-handicapped-people-can't-understand-it-then-it-sucks point.

Translation: Android users are at the mercy of hardware manufacturers and carriers.

What does being open have to do with Motorola not updating one of their phones?

i.e. Don't trust Motorola to update their phones.

Yet another straw man post. He's identified a poor update and then claimed that you need to check out the android sources in order for the advantages of openess to become apparent. In reality I know people who aren't programmers or IT people particularly install cyanogenmod on their phones.<p>This post comes across as a fairly passive-aggressive attack, or a snarky child. I don't know why people rate Gruber's posts. I haven't found his analysis to be particularly insightful. He is usually clear in communicating his feelings about an issue and for that I'd give him credit. But whats the point in reading a clearly communicated thought if its effectively, "I dislike Android, and I intend to bad mouth anything related to Android at any possible opportunity."

CyanogenMod to the rescue?

That comment came from Rubin in the context of Jobs completely botching up the definition of "open-ness". Yet another out of context reference just to be an utter douche. He's been that way ever since Google went after Apple during 2010 IO.

What's his point? it's just the usual passive-aggressive dickishness, I don't understand who keeps upvoting this drivel.