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For all its praises being sang about openness and usability, and the convenience of developers being able to push out application updates whenever they want, this seems to be lacking with Android as an OS.

Google announced today another update to its Nexus One OS. The addition of Multi-touch and some updates to Maps will surely be welcome by most users, as it adds functionality that should have been there at launch. But unlike iPhone owners, who race to iTunes to grab the latest update and punish Apple’s CDN, Nexus One owners will have to wait until….well who knows?

Google say it should be by the end of the week, and there are already a number of people who have done the manual install (see copy zip file to MicroSD card, reboot in recovery mode and apply), regular users can’t rush these things. Its all down to Google, or in many other cases, the handset manufacturer, to deliver these.

This gets even more frustrating when you look at all the other handset users. If you own a Motorola Droid, you’re still stuck on 2.0.1 with nothing but promises that 2.1 is coming, but then will it include the multi-touch as well? Or is that another wait. Hero, G1, G2, and many other variants are still stuck back at 1.6, and with every new update, they keep wondering if they will jump to the latest version, jump to 2.0 or 2.0.1, or even just stay stagnent.

Most of the problem is Android itself. Its a lovely OS in-and-of itself, as the Nexus One demonstrates that, but its open and free, and being adopted by many other manufacturers from HTC to Motorola to Sony Ericsson. The problem arising from each company that needs to keep up its own development of the OS to make sure it works on each of their handsets before they even think about pushing the update out to users, on the usual staggered basis.

I do like Android as an OS, and if I got one, it would have to be a Nexus One, or something that was Google branded, if only to ensure I got the standard Android feel, without the UI tweaks that phone makers implement, and to ensure that I wasn’t held up by some unknown development team who never release information about updates.

Even more maddening is the System Update feature in the Settings of Android, which doesn’t even do what you’d expect, and let you manually check for updates. You still need to wait for the update to be pushed over the air to you personally. Either that, or get dirty with Recovery Mode.

Thanks, but I’ll stick to iTunes and my iPhone. At least I also have everything (contacts, calendars, mail, settings, photos, application settings and data, and bookmarks) backed up out of the cloud. Setting up a replacement Android phone is not as quick as you might think.