On one device, when I opened Android Market after the name changed, it triggered an automatic update to Google Play Store. I don't know whether receiving this update requires first entering Gmail credentials because I was logged in at the time. I'm just guessing, but you could try these in order:

1. Just try logging in. After the transition, it might let you in even without Gmail. If it still gives you the "does not use Gmail" error, try the following steps.
2. Perhaps you could find one of your friends who has a Gmail account, have him or her log in, wait for the device to download and install the update, remove the Gmail credentials from the phone, and enter your own non-Gmail Google Account credentials.
3. Buy a new phone. The Google Play transition happened in March 2012, between Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean 1", and you should be ready for a new contract by now.

That depends on whether the legislature pulls a Sonny Bono and extends the general term of copyright for another few decades before the end of the year.

But then you end up with a resume gap, which might tell prospective employers that you've either A. been rejected by the employers to which you have or should have been applying, or B. been working under the table.

Probably because Apple has so much leverage. Rejecting one brand of Android phone means the user can switch to another brand after the contract is up in order to stay on the same platform and carrier. Even if a carrier rejects all OHA Android phones due to a CDD change that shuts out certain customizations that the carrier considers essential, a carrier can still choose to carry phones built on other AOSP distributions, such as CyanogenMod or Replicant or (once AT&T's exclusivity expires) Fire OS. All these distributions can use the same Amazon Appstore. But rejecting one brand of iOS phone means the carrier's customers lack access to an entire platform and are likely to take their business to another carrier. Besides, Apple already routinely performs a carrier customization in the form of blocking the tethering feature on plans that lack it.

That happened when Android Market became Google Play. In the Android Market days, logging in to Android Market with a non-Gmail Google account sent the user to the Gmail registration process: "tepples@example.com does not use Gmail. Add Gmail to your Google Account." But around the time it became Google Play Store, and certainly by the release of the first-generation Nexus 7 tablet in mid-2012, Google started letting non-Gmail Google Account holders sign in to Google Play.

Perhaps the thinking is that if a service knows and presents the real names of existing users, new users are more likely to trust the service enough to provide their own real names and interests. One of the draws of Facebook, for example, is that users will see real names far more often.

Doesn't the existence of Whopper Lab mean you can tell a computer?

Until you use a 10" screen. They were common in the netbook era but have since returned on laptops like the Transformer Book by ASUS and Aspire Switch by Acer. Some dialogs don't fit and I have to use the window manager's keyboard shortcuts to move the top of the window above the top of the screen to see the OK button. Or by "alternate" do you mean more tabs?

Because it may influence whether Sega decides to port Sonic the Hedgefund Manager to Android or keep it console-only.

If you want to transfer only the subset of your MP3 collection contained in a specific set of playlists, then you may need software to construct the copy job, even if it's just a shell script that parses the m3u files. And until very recently, you needed to install software to connect an Android 4.x phone to a PC because some operating systems didn't come with MTP automounting.

But without rooting, you can't recover the gigabytes occupied by this preinstalled bloatware that you could otherwise have been using to store music and e-books.

Good luck getting any service that way if the only cellular carriers with a usable signal in your area are CDMA2000 carriers like Verizon and Sprint. I'm under the impression that they won't just sell you a CSIM for an unbranded CDMA2000 phone.

Then why doesn't Google let the Android Market decide by including a line in the CDD stating that if you include X, Y, or Z your phones won't get Google Play Store? Google already does that for certain variants of multi-window mode because Google wants to enforce an all maximized all the time use model even if your 10" tablet is as big as two Nexus 7s or four Nexus 5s.

Perhaps it's the carriers dragging their feet on long-term support because they want their subscribers to buy a new phone that comes with a new 2-year contract.

All web browsers in the App Store are either A. wrappers for the same WebKit engine used by Safari with the same limits as Safari, or B. "remote desktop" apps that connect to a browser running on someone else's server such as Opera Mini. Otherwise, according to the App Store Review Guidelines, they can't run JavaScript at all.

"Overrated"? I must have hit an iOS fan's nerve.

Is your company hiring?