Our policy is stricter, we explicitly prohibit someone from connecting to the company E-Mail system with a personally owned device, of course we provide BlackBerry or iPhone devices (user/manager preference) to anyone with even a halfway reasonable explanation.

That isn't Pluto, that's Pluto's moon Charon.

They could just replace the java dependent code with native code for the individual platforms.

It always seemed to me that the Java dependencies were introduced arbitrarily to force OpenOffice users to use Java.

Our latest Dell and HP notebooks include a DisplayPort instead of an HDMI port which the previous models featured, apparently PC makers have to pay something like $0.06 per machine in royalties to include HDMI so they go with DisplayPort instead.

Unfortunately for us users even at monoprice a DisplayPort to HDMI cable costs several $ more than a regular HDMI cable, of course also the DisplayPort cables only come in white.

I stand corrected then, I haven't paid much attention to the Aria.

In any case, this practice seems to be limited to AT&T, why they would do this is easy to speculate about.

Well since so far AT&T only has a single Android phone, I guess you can say that the fact that they block installation of external downloads on that phone "routine" but it's not exactly an accurate representation. In any case the AT&T Backflip is the only Android phone in existence that has this behavior, and they were widely criticized within the Android community for that and other anomalies on that phone, including the use of Yahoo! instead of Google for search as well as the use of Android 1.5 which is the last version made that doesn't support Google Maps with Navigation.

AT&T is coming out with a new Android phone soon, we will see if they do the same thing.

Of course, one could speculate that AT&T has a vested interest in making their Android users experience sup-par to make a certain other phone they sell seem better by comparison.

Actually the summary is incredibly misleading there, TFA talking about 20% apps doesn't say that those 20% are "malicious" only that 20% access your personal information. Which itself isn't much of an issue because anytime you install an App from the market you are presented with a notice that explains everything this app does and interacts with. The word "malicious" doesn't even appear in the article at all. You can credit itwbennett for that bit of FUDdiness.

Also related to the deleting of apps off your phone, just to be clear that's only an option for Google if you install from the Android Market, if you install from a different app source or manually install (both easy to do on any android phone besides the AT&T Backflip) Google has no ability to touch that app.