Amazon - Can we gift it?

So to the sounds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD0vHZxAmso&feature=related 

I have to ask the question to @KindleUK , @AmazonKindle & @Amazon "Can we fix gift it?"

Of course, what I'm referring to is the ability for customers to purchase gift eBooks for other Kindle users...

Now as per previous blog entries I'm a big fan of the Amazon Kindle - and last week was my father's birthday, so my mother purchased him a "Kindle Keyboard 3G". Naturally my brother & I both then planned to gift him a number of good books to read - perfect as he had a couple of long haul flights in the week after.

So on I trundled to the mighty www.amazon.co.uk and went to the Kindle store section - only to find that the only to manage this process in the UK is to buy a gift credit voucher, send that to your intended recipient, have them go shopping for the ebook and use the voucher... Not exactly simple, rather painful and most certainly a DIY present :(

Now of course if I'm a gun-toting, burger eating, economy trashing, redneck American this function has existed on the Amazon.com site here for a long time - but for some reason the mighty largest e-commerce site hasn't be able to enable this trivial feature for their international customers...

Honestly, does it really need to be this hard?

Android - improvement needed?

OK so I'm a massive fan of Google's Android platform, but naturally there are a good few areas that improvement is needed in :-

• Memory - yes my 16GB microSD is great but the 0.5GB internal RAM in my phone (Google Nexus One) is driving me insane, I'm certainly looking forward to the full OS support of app2SD for all applications AND 2GB+ of RAM in devices.

• System Apps (1) - the applications Google bundle. Frankly most of these I don't want and need to be able to uninstall them to free up RAM.

• System Apps (2) - the fact that its possible to optionally download an application but then not be able to uninstall it

• System Apps (3) - that I can't 'force app2sd' these bloated applications drives me mad

• The fact that MMS picture messages save the MMS images in internal RAM that consumes large chunks of RAM per image drives me mad. Its daft to have to manually save each image to SD and then delete the MMS attachment (& no Chomp can't work around this)

• Quality control - 2.3.6 broke a number of new things rather than fixed them :-
• Browser cache now seems to behave oddly after 2.3.6 with it consuming RAM regardless of settings or cache cleaning apps running
• Pinch to zoom for pictures no longer works
• 'Preparing the SD card' after a reboot now seems to take much much long (ie 20+ minutes for 16GB card)

Yes I know I can select a different firmware, but these really should be in the standard build...

Now that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has been finally unveiled there are a couple of other points :-

• Google need to look at making it easier to move between phone devices - transferring settings, desktops, data etc

• I really hope the latest version of gMail application allows native label & folder managment

Right, off to grab a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a play...

The G-Spots

So time for some more positive commentary - a new page on this site here now highlights the 'Grumpy Spotlight' awards for great quality or service.

Naturally this is an entirely personal and subjective list, based on my experiences - but I hope it goes to highlight some places / things that really deserve all the recognition they can get.

I'd welcome any of your recommendations or comments on the items I list.

That time of year....

Well it's that time of year again.

When tens of thousands of fanboys (& fangirls) flock to the west coast of the USA to watch, listen to and worship a benevolent dictator, regarded by the fanboys as almost a messiah, impart the golden missives that will fuel their blinkered direction for the next twelve months...

Now of course, this is either the latest #EvilFruitSeller product release or #CrazyIvan's SnoracleWorld marketing branwashing fiction fest...

So which should you go to? well would it surprise you if I said - "neither, spend your time with your friends & family". Frankly speaking both are about as little value to the average enterprise customer...

Whilst of course both operate an artificially dominante position in certain segments, and certainly market above their stations, they do clearly set certain parts of the IT agenda - BUT frankly as far as I can see there's little point in attending as whatever happens will happen just the same regardless.

Some assorted personal thoughts about both companies :-

• neither is worth trying to engage with dialogue in as neither empowers their staff to have any meaningful dialogue
• neither entity listens & changes their ideas or directions easily
• both companies are most certainly driven strongly with clear internal direction
• both entities are driven by a singular personality - undoubtedly clever & focused, but one that makes decisions in a seemingly random & emotional fashion
• both companies will have to undergo major changes in the public view & internal structure of their senior management teams
• both companies will this week announce new instances of their proprietary lock-in technologies
• both companies trade on emotions & subjective reasoning in the customer base, with little challenge by the fanboys to their cost models or purported benefits 
• both companies are aggressive & arrogant in their manipulation of perceived position in terms of creating lock-in, eroding open standards and attempting to eliminate competition
• both companies specialise in competing with their partners
• both companies have made significant direction changes with their strategies and technology offerings
• both companies have the attention of senior management in their customer bases, and will most certainly drive a number of key areas in the near future

There's plenty more, but let's see how the announcements play out first :)

NDA Briefings - the content lap-dance?

So those who follow my twitter profile, or know me in person, will understand that one of my major annoyances in life is the topic of NDAs.

Now I fully understand what an NDA entails (I've spent enough time with lawyers in my life to know this area very well), and understand why anything more than 2 way NDAs are a genuinely terrifying concept. I also personally know what it means for all involved to 'tear-down' and NDA in 'an aggressive fashion'.

Naturally in my line of work, probably 70% of the external discussions I have are of a confidential content nature, with a high % being purportedly related to NDAs.

So why do they annoy me?

http://twitter.com/ianhf/status/9569522994
Why the hell don't vendors trust customers when under NDA with a copy of the slides? either respect an NDA or don't bother at all..#Annoyed

Well as far as I can see they are increasingly used as a way to restrict the content, or method of delivery of the content, provided to customers. With phrases such as "can't give you to document or presentation as it's NDA" being uttered on a weekly basis - the concepts of trust and respect being lost forever.

A common use of the NDA is to cover future roadmap discussions - naturally enough as for any supplier this is a very sensitive are. But my position is that roadmaps should change, and that's fine. The key is to ensure that there is regular communication & dialogue about the changes. The customer of course needs to have some reference artefacts for a point in time to use for their own decisions, after-all we have to create our own 6/12/18/36mth internal strategies.

Clearly if we can't have a secure & trusted copy of information from a point in time, then we can't reference the information - as my memory is such that I could very easily get information very wrong. In short - if a copy of the information isn't provided that we have little choice but to 'strike it from the record' and ignore it - making the whole 'NDA' exercise worthless all round... As far as I'm concerned this just shows that many vendors simply don't trust or respect their staff or their customers - these are not the vendors I'm interested in working with.

How often are NDA pitches one-way presentations? Sadly all too often :( There are still some good people out there that do genuinely have the sessions as NDA discussions and will influence their roadmaps and/or decisions based on dialogue & requirements - but these are most certainly in the minority.

Whilst I accept some customers may leak NDA information, either consciously or unconsciously, my thoughts are that people should have the courage to penalise those that breach NDA clauses, make an example of them don't penalise those who understand & respect them. But, surely we also need to address the information moving between competitors in the increasingly incestuous IT sales & engineering industry job shuffle (or are lobotomies standard practice in changing jobs between IT suppliers? well now I mention it that would explain many things...,)

A major irony of this is that at least 3 suppliers (eg EeeMSee, SumNotech & SnOracle) all sell commercial IRM/DRM products, but yet they refuse to use these with their own customers for protection of NDA content. Now if this doesn't fit a perfect target use case for IMR/DRM tools then I don't know what would! If partners won't use these products to protect their own content then I sure as heck won't be buying their tools to protect mine! You'd think their own sales teams would be pushing use of the IRM/DRM tools to 'spread the word' so to speak... Either way they should use & trust their DRM tools or kill them...

All of this sadly leaves me to the conclusion that 'NDA briefings' are often now little more than than marketing meetings wrapped in a 'special legal secret sauce' to puff, fluff & massage the ego of the invitees - the "I've been somewhere special" & "I know something you don't" playground taunt factor...

There are words for those who are paid to say & do nice things purely to boost a customers ego - and candidly, I think we'd all rather be with partners than whores!

The Bar

So I thought I'd do a quick summary of the drinks in the home cellar / bar - wine list will be added when I find time :) http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html

vCrack(d)

So VMwere have come out and publicly revealed vSpore v5, including disclosing their new extortion licensing racket model for vSpore v5 here.

Now the positive messages re new features, functions, performance and capability improvements of vSpore 5 have been outweighed in the press & user base by noise around the new license model, and specifically the now licensing of RAM usage.

I don't know about your environments, but I know when we look at our farms they are already RAM constrained and not CPU/core constrained - and this is at RAM/CPU ratios considerably higher than the new licences would enable without additional licence purchases. For us we're also seeing the RAM/CPU ratio increasing from our application providers - everything is increasingly demanding larger quantities of RAM.

This reminds me of a similar approach used by the "independent mobile high-street pharmaceutical suppliers" :-

1. Release an exciting product to establish lust & demand
2. Make chunks of it free (eg ESXi) to widen the customer base & hearts/minds
3. Encourage large deployment & consolidation based on over-subscription and utilisation
4. Then change the payment rules for the next version and drive the requirement for additional licences (hence revenue) for exactly the same solution & architecture between existing & future versions

To me it's clear that when a company measures itself on revenue & profit growth, and especially if they are in a rapidly commoditising market, that there has to be new ways of obtaining the growth (let alone standing still against increased competition). So it would appear the current model is to extract revenue from the core value the product offers. In itself making the overall virtualisation offering less beneficial from an ROI/TCO perspective - but I guess the assumption is that people are so addicted committed to the product & solution that they wont bother questioning the value of the solution again.

I also think VMwere are trying to deflect their changes by talking about 'Align the vSpore licensing model with IT as a service', somehow avoiding the point that most organisations already happily translate capex+opex investment -> to internal recharge. In fact many don't want their private hypervisor farms to have a cost profile more aligned to public IaaS (ie variable opex).

Page 11 of the vSpore licensing FAQ pdf also makes a claim re "today’s average consolidation ratios of 5:1" - this seems to be considerably different (ie lower) than the claims & statements VMwere make in all their sales & marketing materials of consolidation rations of 10-20:1 being common. Love to hear more about 'average VMwere is only 5:1'....

So what sort of impact will this have?

• for some people & use case it'll make no difference
• for others it will drive material impacts on capex for additional licences, and of course opex as it relates to support/maint of the licences
• generally I feel this will make life more complex for virtualisation designers & architects that now need to design & estate manage around RAM specifically

My feeling is that this will trigger a number of things :-

• Draw attention to the review of actual benefits/cost Vs forecast benefits/costs of ongoing virtualisation programmes
• Inhibit some new virtualisation projects due to cost increases
• Allow VMwere's competitors to be able to promote & market their technology based upon costs/value, in turn generating noise in the IT ecosystem and thus consuming the customer's time in FUD / hype fighting
• Cause many customers to expedite their reviews of the rapidly maturing viable alternate hypervisor / IaaS tooling market, with a view to move wholesale to an alternative or to dual source hypervisors
• I'm also wondering if this is a step towards VMwere licensing their technology by active virtual machines (and dimensions of machines) rather than the underpinning physical infrastructure

I fully understand, agree with and respect the need for companies to make revenue and profit, but I always find it strange when successful companies decide to shoot a foot off or commit slow suicide through strangling their customers...

Rounding the wagons?

So the tin providers can see the differentiation end coming, they can see the need to drop their high margins are vast & costly sales structures and move into other areas.

A few of these talk a story, but very very few of them appear to be able to do something meaningful or lasting.

Consolidation in the infrastructure stack market - lots of blogs talking about this, lots of disruption and issues, lots of risk & downside for the customer.

Oracle made the first move with an application provider acquiring Sun in order to control their own destiny re infrastructure and have better control of their own margins, but despite this they have a dead h/ware business that they are desperate to force onto customers (although I think few Oracle people understand the word customer, most seem to  interpret it as fund payer for their Porsche & holiday homes). Increasingly we now see that Snoracle's applications are 'only provided' or 'only supported' if bolted to the tin albatrosses bodged together by themselves.

EMC and their pet VMWare are nibbling around the edges purchasing software development tool companies, acquirin some serious individual tallent and now into the DW/BI and eventually database area.

If I look at HP, they have lots - but several areas they are lacking in (excusing the clear lack of sales, marketing & product proposition talent) are :-

• Database
• Middleware
• x86 Server Operating Systems

If I look at IBM, they have everything except direction, sales, marketing, focus and conviction...

SAP buying Sybase was interesting for a number of reasons :-

• Removes the last major (meaning deployments in existing data-centres) RDBMS from the table for those infrastructure companies desperate to have a plat in the database world (eg EMC, HP etc)
• Will further muddy the water with SAP's database usage relationship with Oracle
• Might knock some sense into Sybase's management team
• Doesn't seem to add much obvious additional value, synergies or savings for SAP
• Will likely start a bidding war for other 'platform tool' players in the mobility market - although all of these will be competing with the networks & the device providers themselves...

But when do we see the first IT infrastructure company buy a business application software provider? Would you put money on EMC or HP acquiring Teradata, SAP, SAS, Amdocs, Comverse, Sage, Tibco

Is anybody interested in acquiring Citrix? BMC? Symantec? RedHat? Novell?

Of course all of the infrastructure companies are courting Microsoft for partnership scraps off the table in the SMB application areas.

So whilst the masters of FUD fight their whispering battles against each other, the account teams become increasingly desperate and high-maintenance and the manufacturers fight each other (eg Snoralce Vs Intel/HP) as far as I can see it's only the customer that loses - quality, clarity, options, stability all reducing...

Metric, SI & ISO matters

So watching @rootwyrm & @bradhedlund argue about DC design and facilities so time back reminded me of one of my main pet hates. That of people that still use imperial measurements!

Heck even the country that defined them has (mainly) moved on to SI & ISO units. So you can imagine quite how irritating / depressing / demoralising it is to hear technology people talk about lbs, feet, BTU etc

Metric is very simple, more precise and used in the majority of countries. KPIs and measurements matter seriously, and in this global culture it is vital that everybody uses & thoroughly understands exactly the same dimensions and measures.

But yet even in this age of iPads & Android phones, IT vendors still use archaic measurements in their specifications & benchmarks.

Woe betide the first provider I hear offering me 14lbs of cloud servers. or 5/16th of a TB/s bandwidth...

Alarm Bells

So in my experience everybody has their own individual hot buttons, the topics that trigger those alarm bells in your head. The statements that make you stop what you were doing, and sit up to actually pay attention to the meeting / conference call / video conference you were supposed to be enduring / participating in.

Now for me these alarm bells can be areas I have particular specialist expertise in (started small and reducing daily), topics I have a passion in (growing), FUD, or just things that leave me initially dumfounded.

Naturally in the last few years I've had plenty of these, a couple of recent ones that come to mind are :-

1) "Writing data to a CD at a person's desk and keeping it in a drawer is more secure than storing it on an array in a corporate information management platform within a data centre"

2) "We need physical segregation between virtual servers" (Now depending on the context this can be valid in order to enable fault tolerant services, however 90% of the time its used by non-trusting tin huggers.)

So once I'd closed the PowerPoint deck that I was inevitably editing at the time, asked for a replay of the conversation & recovered my composure - I thought for a while (quite a while in fact, in order to self censor the expletives).

My first conclusion was a simple one - "Are the TeleTubbies now working in IT?". My second conclusion was probably of more use - "IT is moving too fast and leaving many people, processes, definitions, roles & techniques without time to adjust - let alone time for diverse disciplines to align.". My third conclusion was "people still look at partial, incomplete & inaccurate cost models - and have little actual or mental methods for valuing risk or consequence"

Not a radical, new or difficult set of conclusions at all really - but ones we don't seem to be making any real progress on. But something that are vital for us to resolve urgently in order to prevent the IT technology hermits detailing the future.

Oh and (with the exception of @Beaker) I continue to believe IT Security dudes live in an entirely parallel independent universe with no concept of reality, consequence or costs!

Kindle - IT companies take note

So as per my previous blog entries show, I'm a major personal fan of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. It's really improved my reading experience and consumption.

So why do I think Kindle is important to IT companies? Well to put it simply it's a great cross-platform framework for information delivery and consumption! I can seamlessly access & synchronise the same eBook content on an iPhone, Android phone, PC, iPad & Kindle ereader.

Yes Kindle can read & display existing Adobe PDF files, but they are nowhere near as usable & visually readable as eBook format documents.

There are also some other interesting advantages :-

* built in secure channels for charged, or less public, content

* ability to automatically push & receive updated document versions

* the annotations & highlighting capabilities allow peers to share 'user feedback & content' associated with the document & topic

So Gartner, when will you deliver your reports & papers via Kindle's secure subscription channels?

So EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, Cisco, Netapp, Oracle et al - when are you going to deliver your whitepapers, product manuals and documentation in eBook format?

From a marketing aspect, just bundle a kindle (or iPad running kindle) with your enterprise data-centre products - stock it full if your documentation and watch your happy customers...

Still here

Yes I'm still here, yes I'm daftly busy right now on all the wrong kinds of work - overall my mood could probably be best described by :-

Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to finish and publish the 90+ partially written blog posts and move back to more IT infrastructure related topics...

@Twitter Vs @Twitdroyd

So this weekend was an interesting one in the twittersphere. On Friday twitter decided to suspend UberMedia client products for some rather unclear reasons.

Now for years there has been tension between platform owners and platform access gateways. With the company behind @twidroyd rumoured to 'gate' up to 20% of twitter usage there are clearly bigger games at play.

So what did I personally learn from & get reminded about from this :-

1) my main usage of twitter is now via my Android Nexus One phone

2) Twidroyd is by far the best android twitter application - I tried twitter www mobile, twitter native app, tweetdeck & tweetcaster. Whilst tweetcast was the best it was still frustratingly poor compared to @twidroyd

3) I now use twitter as my first point of call to gauge the pulse on both the IT industry & world events

4) That I spend money, and am now 'dependent' on, cloud services that I have no SLA or control over

A minor blip for sure, but I'm expecting quite a few more of these in the future as providers go through the wrangling re who "owns" the customer & the data they create...

End of availability

Just a quick post this morning, no it's not about my seemingly new role as "GrumpyHermit" but rather about vendor product churn.

You see in the last two weeks I've had two supposedly global 'top 5' IT infrastructure vendors casually inform us that four of the products we standardise on worldwide will no longer be purchasable in ten days time!

Now naturally we have agreements in place re minimum 18 months availability, and 6 months advanced notice of any EOA date - but nowadays these get treated with the corporate equivalent of "meh" by suppliers...

Naturally this has all sorts of impacts to WIP projects, our design & build teams and our competency centres re build images & operational readiness acceptance etc.

This is further compounded by the vendors increasingly operating "build to order" policies with little or no stock held in channels, thus causing inevitable delays around each sku change. Of course it doesn't help that this increased rate of change appears to be hand in hand with a reduction in core quality & testing by suppliers.

So please vendors I implore you to remember that diversity is the enemy of efficiency and drives real world customer costs through the roof... Please give some serious thought as to how to abstract the customer from the now constant hardware & firmware changes masked in so called 'benefits' (it's 5% faster, 7% greener, 3% cheaper etc) that need new configs, new drivers, new testing, different interop skus etc.

From my perspective, if its not a "direct field replacement unit compatible" then it generates real cost and pain - not dissimilar to that of changing suppliers...

Oh and whilst I'm on the topic, why isn't there a standard (ISO, DTMF, ANSI etc) on product lifecycle definitions & lifecycle events?? And don't even get me started on the concept of major & minor product version numbering standards and conventions between products & vendors...

The current situation on all these areas is chaotic, unacceptable and untenable. The IT industry is slowly killing itself through unwanted & unwarranted 'change for changes sake' that is driving a real but often unreported cost time bomb...

A quick thought - and a possible explanation?

Well below is something I've seen written up before on various web sites & forums - so no credit to me - but it could certainly be a good explanation for a fair number of business projects, proposals, technologies and products I've been pitched over time :-

In The Beginning Was The Plan
And The Plan had Assumptions
And The Assumptions Were Without Form
And The Plan Was Without Substance
And The Darkness was upon the face of the workers

and they spoke amongst themselves, saying 
"It is a crock of st, and it stinketh"

and the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth "It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odour thereof"

and the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them, "It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it"

and the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth "It is a vessel of fertilizer and it has great strength"

and the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them, "It promotes growth and is very powerful"

and the Vice Presidents went unto the President and sayeth unto him, "This new Plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of The Company"

and the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good and The Plan became Policy.

Certainly worth remembering that sometimes there is nothing better than clear and direct communication to the people at the very top, and never assume the people at the top understand what's really going on, or being done, or sold...

Some thoughts on little green men

No not the aliens that your typical tinfoil hat wearing nutter will recount in detail whilst drooling slightly - but as some of you will know I've been a user of Google Android for a couple of years now, on a number of different phones, versions and builds. Currently I'm using the native Android v2.2.1 on the Google reference Nexus One platform - and I have to say it's really rather good...

Naturally there are however some annoyances that I'd like to see tweaked :-

Memory Related

• More memory - the standard 512 MB ROM & 512 MB RAM (and in my unit an additional 32GB of SD card) might sound big compared to some devices, but the phone really would benefit from at least 1GB (but better 2GB) of RAM. With 160+ applications installed I find I'm now at the point of 'remove one to install one' re the dreaded 'low memory' warning...
• Cache management - with a number of common applications (eg Browser, Tweetdeck etc) I've started to notice that they consume RAM memory as cache but don't release it automatically, leading to applications having 10-15MB of RAM memory as cache (often triggering the 'low memory' warning)  until you manually clear the cache using the application manager.
• Not an Android core issue but some applications should handle memory better - for instance ChompSMS stores MMS images in RAM and not on SD storage, and refuses to receive text messages if the 'low memory' indicator is showing despite having GBs of SD card space free.

SD Card Storage Related

• There should be the ability to force any application to be moved or installed onto SD card storage - works fine on 'rooted' ROMs so should be a possible setting for standard ROMs
• Google to enable their applications to install on SD card storage, rather than the majority currently refusing to support it (for example gMail, Earth, Maps, Voice Search, YouTube, Listen, )
• To be able to 'partition' the SD card (or have a better USB driver) so that when the phone is connected to a PC via USB the applications & widgets on the SD card continue to operate.
• Fix the update bug that occasionally occurs (ie twice in 4 months for me) for applications installed onto SD card storage detailed here and fixed here

Application MarketPlace
MarketPlace improvements, for it to have :-

• Verified developers - ability for developers to get some for of 'tested & verified safe' certificate from a trusted authority, to ensure that the developer name shown in the MarketPlace really is from the perceived developer / company
• Verified applications - ability for applications to get some for of 'tested & verified safe' certificate from a trusted authority (eg to protect against malware & trojans etc)
• The application profile should be updated to show if the application supports move/install to SD card storage, and how much RAM the application uses after install (not just how much storage it needs)
• Ability to manage my phone's applications from a desktop PC browser - to be able to uninstall existing applications, browse & search the marketplace to install applications and upload my own APK applications for install. All of these changes to then be synchronised over-the-air to the device.
• To be able to do 'bulk backup/restore/installs' of applications onto devices - eg when I change device to be able to 'backup' all my existing installed apps and then 'restore/install' them onto new device in a single action
• To better align the various MarketPlace versions around the world - it's getting more than a bit irritating seeing applications that only exist in the USA version of the MarketPlace and not the international ones
• Sort out billing and payments to international developers - it's frustrating to only be able to get the 'lite' or 'free' version of an application via the MarketPlace, but then have to go to some other website to purchase a license key for the full featured version.
• It would be good to add-in age rating 'certificates' (eg as per films & PC games etc) for applications in the MarketPlace
• To be able to search and/or filter the display of applications in the MarketPlace by attributes (eg age suitability, support SD or not, size, release / update dates etc)

Miscellaneous

• Support for folders on the home screens (and more home screens - think a 5x5 grid of screens rather than current 1x5) - to allow applications to be grouped together into nested folders on any of the home screens
• Add back the WMA / WMV codecs that were previously in Android 1.x - yes MP3/MP4 are fine but support for WMx should also be standard as it was originally
• WiFi connectivity - now it might just by the CostlyCo utter junk that I'm currently suffering as a wireless router, but there does appear to be some fragility with working with wireless N based wifi networks
• Of course the topic of proxy servers and authenticated proxy servers via the wifi connection needs to be resolved in order to be able to use to enterprise networks properly
• Enable Live Wallpapers to work automatically upon reboot if they've been installed onto SD
• Full native OS / device backup/restore into the cloud - not just contacts and application purchases but all content on the phone. Yes you can purchase applications to do this but it really should be standard.
• To be able to completely uninstall some of the standard OS bundled applications I never use or want (eg Facebook & Twitter native clients etc)
• To be able to do remote phone location discovery/tracking and also secure erase management from a PC browser (ie should I leave my phone somewhere I can remotely discover where it is and issue a 'remote destroy' command etc)
• It would also be rather useful if they could 'fix' the Google 'Finance' application, as it spend more time failing to work or synchronise than it does working

For some of my previous posts re Android see here - as I said I'm a major fan of Android and what it's done to overturn a lacklustre & incumbent marketplace (anybody remember Symbian?). So for 2011 I'm looking forward to Android v2.3 & v3.0 to see just what of above gets done, and how far this real OS flies onwards past the competition...