The OS allows one to optionally integrate twitter/facebook/linkedin feeds and contacts into the phone's core contacts/photos/activity apps, not unlike WebOS.
One unique feature on WP is the ability to group users (such as family or co-workers), and create live tiles on the main screen for such groups. New activity from those users (such as tweets, pictures, facebook postings, etc) will be visible at a quick glance. It enables me to keep in touch with important people without opening various apps and digging through mountains of noise.
Yep. Some android phones (like mine) have facebook and twitter apps that cannot be uninstalled, too.
Presumably by my mobile network company, not the manufacturer.
I've never used them, but they do annoy with occasional update requests.
Will put Cyanogen on the phone soon enough though.
They can't be uninstalled because they are installed in a compressed read-only filesystem that is expensive and risky to rewrite. This engineering compromise forces you to look at the icons of applications that you don't want to look at in exchange for more functionality from a cheaper device.
We all wish this was some conspiracy by the carriers to force you to expose your personal information to Facebook, but the reality is, it's a convenience for the 99.9% of people that do want to use Facebook. It would be inconvenient if phones came with no applications. It would be too expensive if every phone shipped every application on every Android market. So the carriers aim somewhere in the middle. The rest is an implementation detail.
A feature to "soft delete" applications in Android would be nice; instead of physically deleting the bits from the filesystem, just hide the icons and intents. I'm sure a patch implementing this would be most welcome.
I don't have the cm problem you are talking about. Moreover, it is a fixable bug, not a feature like Facebook app installed by default. You are comparing apples and bananas.
One unique feature on WP is the ability to group users (such as family or co-workers), and create live tiles on the main screen for such groups. New activity from those users (such as tweets, pictures, facebook postings, etc) will be visible at a quick glance. It enables me to keep in touch with important people without opening various apps and digging through mountains of noise.