Other than Honeycomb and GoogleTV being not open sourced (which Google admits is a one off which will be fixed in Ice Cream Sandwich), what other evidence of them locking Android down is there? It really felt like a throw away line.
Meanwhile, HTC makes rather awesome phones and this makes it much easier to suggest phones to other developers.
I would suggest a Thinkpad T series or X series as her primary machine. The 420, 520, 220 series are quite modern but still rolling out. For a little less money you can get the yesteryear model which offer more choices of features. Dell Latitudes are also solid machines in my experience and I have heard good things about HP's Elite book line but lack first hand experience. As a rule of thumb if you see it in a big box store stay away; the build quality is often compromised for cost, and the Windows install is often full of crapware.
To the
OP was referring to the Nexus One (Google's phone). Gingerbread hasn't OTAed to the Nexus One yet. In December they said it would be in a few weeks and it has turned into in a few months.
I happen to be someone who actually likes Spring. A few months ago, I was asked to do a proof of concept project; it was basically a event organizing system with a plug-in architecture.
A little google fu later and I found out Eclipse used OSGi for its plug in systems, Netbeans was going to support OSGi for their plugins, and Spring had an OSGi container solution called Spring DM AND Manning had this book in MEAP. I downloaded the earliest copy, ran through the "Hello World!"s and was on my way.
Then I actually had to implement OSGi. Packages wouldn't load, they would load in the wrong order, jars weren't OSGi aware, etc etc etc. After two weeks of long nights of frustration I gave up. The next morning I wrote a classloader and was up and running in about 2 hours.
To add insult to injury, SpringSource gave Spring DM to the Eclipse foundation and washed their hands of future development.
TL;DR; If you want to use OSGi + Spring DM: Don't, Spring gave DM to Eclipse and OSGi is a shitstorm waiting to rain itself out. Write your own classloader and in two hours and 200 lines of Java you will have 80% of OSGi and 99% of what you care about.
The trashcans just tell if they have been rolled out to be picked up. If they haven't recorded a roll out then you get fined if your trash has more than 10% recyclable material.
To one significant figure, they are.
The Nexus one is most likely the ADP 3. IE the third generation developer phone. IE Purchasable on Google's developer site. IE Not marketed to fucking consumers.
What makes me think this is that Google has given out the ADP1 at their Christmas party last year, the ADP2 at IO, and the Nexus-One (presumed ADP3) at their Christmas party this year.
There is no more or less magic to this.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood