After nearly two months of Androiding, I've come to a few realizations. Some of these aren't exactly earth shattering, but it's my blog, my soapbox, and I'm going to spout off.

First of all, the system is here to stay. It's robust, easy to code for, and at the risk of pissing off Apple, there's an app for just about everything I could want. DVR scheduler, sports, games, navigation... I've got them all, and for the most part, they were free. This, however, is a bit of a sore spot, as the device I bought just doesn't have enough internal space. With apps that automatically update themselves (cough, market), and the various other things going on behind the scenes, my 100MB of free space has dropped to about half that. But, whatever, my fault for not doing my research.

Second, vanilla android sucks. Yeah, I said it, and I mean it. If you're going to use Android, you *need* some sort of skin on top of it. Launchers are great, but unless you've got something that hides/massages some of the awful crap that's going on with the rest of the system, it's awful.

For example, messaging. It's 2011, and I've got 3 different applications to manage 3 message types. I've got messages for my MMS/SMS, the Yahoo mail app for my Yahoo mail, and the GMail app for GMail. If I felt saucy enough to hook my exchange server into the phone, that'd be 4 applications.

WTF!

The Blackberry, for all of it's faults, doesn't just surpass Android when it comes to messaging... it takes it behind the woodshed and proceeds to beat the daylights out of it. Even iOS has a universal inbox. This is just beyond idiotic, it's insane.

Google: Develop a unified inbox, and give providers API hooks into it. It seems to work for RIM, and there's no reason it shouldn't work for you.

Everyone slams Motorola for their Motoblur UI, and rightfully so, as it sucked when it first came out. Supposedly recent versions are better, and you know what... I'm considering buying a phone with blur just so I can get down to two messaging applications. It's just that bad.

The other reason I'd consider going Blur is Sense UI. Sense looks great. It's got some amazing widgets. It's also quite fond of crapping in the notes fields of my GMail contacts, and occasional dementia. In the last 3 weeks, I've had to reset various accounts twice because Peep/FriendStream would force close on launch. Deleting and re-adding the accounts works, but then I have to go through and fix my contact links and whatnot.

It happened again today. I haven't done the delete/re-add yet because I'm contemplating some sort of very annoyed email towards T-Mobile/HTC.

Part of the problem with Sense, I think, is that everything happens on your phone. That's why Sense users end up with crappage in our various contact notes fields on GMail.. it's Sense making it's own little notes and figuring out what to do with various contacts and links. Sure, it works, but that sort of stuff needs to happen in the cloud. For all of it's faults, Blur seems to get that aspect right.

So, I've got 3 options before me. They are:

• Grit my teeth and deal with this sense madness.
  
• Upgrade to the MyTouch 4G Slide and hope that the new version of Sense sucks less.
  
• Take a chance on a Blur enabled phone.
  

Anyone got any advice here?