Some people are motivated by money (half to two thirds, IIRC), others will take something average, and a few will take something relatively low paid but very interesting (e.g. games AI or film industry CGI stuff).

Right, even though M$ offers a higher starting salary out of college (~80k for a CPE vs 65k from LMC), I chose not to interview with them when I was offered because I felt like I would be a hypocrite for working for a company that conflicts with my moral and ideological beliefs.

That's exactly my point. One specific example I remember from a while back had to do with telling a list view to redraw itself. For most devices, it would work without difficulty. On a certain set of devices, the exact same call would happily return without actually updating the listview, because the handset manufacturer and/or carrier thought they knew better and tinkered with the underlying functionality of the OS and subsequently broke something.

That sort of fragmentation - a million tiny undocumented forks - can't be gracefully handled by abstractions, capability querying, or API versioning. And the only way to discover that this sort of problem will occur is to actually run the software on the afflicted devices to see what breaks. *That* sort of problem is what TweetDeck is referring to when they say "more than a hundred different versions of Android", and is the sort of problem that causes people to complain about Android fragmentation.

Your parents represent what is wrong with the world right now. By your statements, and your sig, you are a teenager--a child--and not legitimately responsible for the goods you're provided by your parents...and this is regardless of whether or not they buy your Blackberry or Droid phones for you, or make you pony up the cash yourself to get them. While nothing (yet) appears to have happened to any of these toys is pretty well meaningless; the law of averages says that anything will happen that can. By which I mean, at some point one of these devices will end up a brick, whether by your actions, the actions of your friends, or simple defect that happened to occur on day 370 of your owning your current device. And what will this cause? A pain in the ass call to customer care whining about the now-useless phone, either by your parental units (because they've spent SO much money, they feel they're owed something by the company happy to take it) or you (with your own sense of entitlement because it's just your toy, you don't really see the costs of it, or the merits of holding back every once in a while), demanding something be done to accomodate you. But really, in the end, do you really need a device that fully-featured? A good number of simple, inexpensive feature phones can handle YouTube (type m.youtube.com to ensure you get to the right place, redirects sometimes don't work), web browsing, hell, even ISP-based email (if your parental units think Hotmail too risky). You don't need Enterprise connectivity, and from the App stores, you're not likely to get anything that isn't a game that you'll play in class, simultaneously wasting money (of whomever pays the bill, likely not you) and nerfing your GPA. In the end, you're going to have one hell of a shock when you get out on your own and have to deal with your mobile phone being your responsibility--and I hope for you AND your parents' sake that this happens the very day you turn 18--it adds up quick, and once you're on the hook, it's damned expensive to stay in OR get out.

What other service provider?