I might missed an announcement here - but will Verizon load their bloatware onto ICS, or has Google managed to get them to ship a clean Android installation on these phones?
Generally these Google flagship devices have little to no bloatware (depending on what you consider bloatware), and one of the more interesting parts of the ICS announcement was that you can easily disable apps (which stops from running and removes them from home/app screens but not from the device) pretty easily from system settings.
Nice. As far as I know, this is the first time that Verizon has one of the flagship devices - so didn't know if they were to give this phone the same bloatware treatment as my Droid X.
Well, the original Droid was kind of an almost-flagship. It was marketed in conjunction with Google, and it had an unlocked bootloader, unlike subsequent Verizon Motorola Droids. It also wasn't skinned with MotoBlur.
I've owned both the original Droid and the Droid X, and the original one definitely had less crapware, and the vanilla OS was nice, as was the much easier modding.
I've actually really liked Motorola hardware, and I like the more angular, more dinstinctive industrial design of the Motorola devices better than Samsung devices, but I have to admit that I'm drooling over this phone. ICS looks amazing, and seems to address almost every complaint I've had about Android so far.
And with access to the source, why couldn't the carriers/handset makers just hack the OS to disable the app disabling of their particular bloatware? Unless there's a license agreement that might prevent this...
