Favorite Apps for your Smartphone

[mlmpetert]

^Ive always gotten my upgrades through Verizon. Im starting to think the better route would be to buy from retailers....

The Galaxy Nexus looks really nice, especially with that curved screen but im officially waiting for the Droid 4 (i really need hard keys) which should hopefully be out any day now. Im really hoping its initially offered through a retailer like Costco or Amazon Mobile and i can save 100 or 1/3 of the price.

I also got a question if anyone knows a bit about android stuff.

I am against locked bootloaders because they just seem to go against my principles, although ill likely never root or do anything real fancy with my phones so at the end of the day they likely wont impact me much. The thing that drives me nuts though is unremovable bloatware. Ive heard the newer motorola phones are supposed to have a option to remove it (or permanently hide it).

So knowing that I probably wont want to try and hack a locked bootloader does anyone know if bootloaders or UI’s ever get updated by the phone company; in this case Motorola? It seems a big selling point for androids are what Android OS the phone is using, the newest being Ice Cream Sandwich which will/is replacing Gingerbread. So if I buy a newer phone like the Razr or the Droid 4 which both run Gingerbread out of the box, but with the promise that it will updated to Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as fully ready, will there be any updates to the Motorola UI when the new OS is ready? Are UI’s tailored to the Android OS theyre sitting on top of?

Basically should a Galaxy Nexus UI always be (in theory) smoother on Ice Cream Sandwich than a Droid 4 UI that was originally made for Gingerbread, or will the Moto UI update so that its also designed for the new OS?