> Your best bet for upgrades is a high-end HTC phone on Verizon.

Your best bet is a phone that's designed to be rootable. Why put something like that in the hands of the user-hostile carriers?

Surely your best bet is an unlocked phone running vanilla Android, rather than any carrier-customised variant? Every carrier customisation has to be ported to the new version each time the OS gets upgraded.

I agree. Though the only unlocked vanilla android phones I know of are the ones from Google. Good devices, but limited selection.

Regarding "It seems safe to say, then -- no big surprise -- that aside from considering a phone's manufacturer, going with a higher profile, top-of-the-line device will improve your odds of receiving regular OS upgrades..." The Epic 4g has been Sprint's flagship phone, still running Eclair. I'm regretting not going with the Evo at times.

I'm on Sprint with a Samsung Moment, forever stuck on 2.1. The Moment was officially dropped by Samsung 9 months from release with the only recent update being a fix* to the radio driver because the CDMA radio would die so badly it couldn't call out (including being unable to call 911...an FCC violation) and it required a reboot to fix.

Sprint has been known to replace it for free with an HTC Hero if you throw enough tantrums and demand enough replacements of the same model, but really, Samsung is to blame here. I will never own another Samsung phone and have prevented others from buying them as well. I've personally given up hopes of the problem ever being rectified, but I'm switching my family to Verizon/iPhones at the end of my contract.

* It didn't really fix anything. The radio still dies randomly, just slightly less often.

Those two links are absolutely fantastic!