In my possession, I have a fairly old HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.5 (no, it didn't come with that) which I expect to have running WinMo 7 prettymuch as soon as it comes out. I carry and use this phone every day. When it still ran the carrier's OS image, it was an unstable piece of garbage. The minute I flashed it to a generic image (and readded HTC's nice suite of addons), it became rock stable. I've had to reset it exactly once (and that was because of a bug in an app that *I* coded).

So, handset manufacturers, I think the lesson here is that if you stop letting the carriers futz with hardware drivers to lock things down, you won't have to complain about Windows Mobile being unstable.

Contrast this to my fiancee's iPhone - which has been to the Apple Store twice for exchange because the Wifi chip arbitrarily decides that it hates life.

Android has a very legitimate chance at overtaking the "Casual Smartphone" market. You know, the one filled with TMobile Sidekicks and other featurephones masquerading as smartphones. It's already beaten S60 in the US because we don't have any S60 phones. At all. That leaves 3 market segments left. The Fashion Phone segment, which consists of the iPhone and select Blackberries, the Executive segment, which consists of primarily Blackberries, and the Utilitarian segment, which consists of all the people that buy Windows Mobile because it's a versatile computing platform with a braindead simple development environment (as well as the excessive inherent customizability).

Fashion Phone Segment - Android doesn't stand a chance until a celeb trades their Blackberry in for one. The iPhone portion of this segment is almost untouchable because Android is missing the logo.

Executive Segment - Not a bloody fucking chance here, either, because the thing won't connect to RIM's mail server and the fractured handset manufacturers won't be sending sales reps to golf courses.

Utilitarian Segment - They have a shot here. They need to make the devkit easier to use (Drag and drop Visual Studio style easy to use, because that's what Windows Mobile has) and build the same vast, varied array of software and developers that WinMo has. Every aspect of the phone has to be user customizable, users should be able to freely update the OS (within reason), and the fucking carriers need to be prevented from making crippling customizations.