[darklajid]

  It hopes that new software features will help to 
  make its new handset stand out. 

Bzzt. Thank you very much. I'm in the market for a new phone, you are not targeting me. Sense? No way. And no, 'Software' on top of Android is not going to make your phone nice to buy for this particular guy here.

Searching on for a decent 'stock' device..

[cbs]

Searching for a good stock device? Don't write it off just for some bad customizations. If you're up to the task, find the best looking/specked phone for your price that has quality, active cyanogenmod support (all the hardware in the device works well w/ cm).

Saying this on hacker news feels a bit sacrilegious, but don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. The well supported phones have good wiki pages and rooting/flashing them isn't all that hard. But you will only have yourself to blame if it goes sideways.

[mrich]

I still don't understand the hate HTC gets for Sense, it is mostly great and an improvement over stock Android. Also HTC provide new Android versions nowadays in reasonable time. Android and the "derivatives" are evolving quickly, make sure you are not judging on outdated facts.

[vetinari]

This device, which will be available at the end of March, will come with Android 4.1.2.

Meanwhile, 4.2.2 is already out in the wild. HTC's attitude towards updates is not something that I imagine as reasonable time.

[untog]

Plenty of people do like Sense, though. I agree with you- I hate it, and I'm disappointed that my only real device choice is a Nexus 4. But we're a minority, and manufacturers need to differentiate themselves from each other.

[CrazedGeek]

For what it's worth, some of the manufacturer UIs are better than AOSP now. TouchWiz is actually quite nice now, shockingly enough.

[darklajid]

Maybe (I cannot say a thing about TouchWiz).

Do you get reasonable fast upgrades for old (like, month old) phones though, if Android moves forward? Do you get updates at all? Does it (the 'improved' ROM) include unremovable crapware?

Even if all answers to the questions above are positive (as in, the 'right' answer): Do you buy a phone for the software improvements on top of a widely available platform?

I buy decent hardware (sturdy, well made, slick) & support for improvements to the software that this manufacturer didn't even create in the first place. So far, only Nexus devices seem to fit the bill.

[CrazedGeek]

Based on my experiences with the Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S3, and Note 2, in order: Yes, for at least one major version (this is a little hard to qualify). Yes, but nearly all of it is disableable (there's one app that isn't, but it's small and never runs, so I don't care too much). No, but if I'm buying the phone already, it's a nice extra.

I tend to buy my devices based purely on what they can do now as opposed to that and future support, which I know isn't really common here. If it's a tradeoff between future software improvements (which recently haven't been all that substantial: 4.2 was nothing special, and 4.1 was only slightly better than ICS) and current hardware capabilities (those phones are all reasonably thin and have removable batteries and SD card slots, two things that the Nexus line currently lacks), I'm going with the hardware.

[tjoff]

TouchWiz is horrid.

Also, even if it some day would become decent it would still be inferior just because it's tied to one manufacturer.

[ebtalley]

I have to chime in on the opposite spectrum. I had an evo and use a note 2 as the primary phone. I rooted the evo and put on Cynogen because I got more from the phone by doing so. Removing touchwiz and putting on cynogen or other aosp on the note would net me less functionality this time around. Unless google adds a stylus to their spec I don't see the (absolute) inferiority of forking the aosp trunk.

call it redhat vs debian.