(Sorry for the throwaway; I still work for the same company and we we still have various relationships with each other.)
I worked in like '04-'08 building third party mobile software for a large variety of manufacturers and devices. Remember, this was pre-iphone, so there was a big business in building component X for device Y on platform Z.
In my experience of device manufacturers:
Nokia was insanely arrogant; the google of its day. Sony Ericsson were quite good, it showed that they wanted to build a quality experience.
The Japanese manufacturers were absolutely insane. They would routinely produce P1 bug reports in the style of "we opened the X application repetatively. On the 1154th time it crashed on start-up. Sometimes."
We had a few projects with Motorola together with US carriers. They were total nightmares - the Motorola engineers seemed like they had been picked up from the streets of Hyderabad the day before. (This is not a racial prejudice: most of the Indian engineers I've come across in the industry have actually been remarkably talented. This is not valid for the Motorola engineers though.) Most of these device projects were very high profile in the US, and presumably important for Motorola; yet they couldn't or wouldn't muster better staffing.
I worked in like '04-'08 building third party mobile software for a large variety of manufacturers and devices. Remember, this was pre-iphone, so there was a big business in building component X for device Y on platform Z.
In my experience of device manufacturers:
Nokia was insanely arrogant; the google of its day. Sony Ericsson were quite good, it showed that they wanted to build a quality experience.
The Japanese manufacturers were absolutely insane. They would routinely produce P1 bug reports in the style of "we opened the X application repetatively. On the 1154th time it crashed on start-up. Sometimes."
We had a few projects with Motorola together with US carriers. They were total nightmares - the Motorola engineers seemed like they had been picked up from the streets of Hyderabad the day before. (This is not a racial prejudice: most of the Indian engineers I've come across in the industry have actually been remarkably talented. This is not valid for the Motorola engineers though.) Most of these device projects were very high profile in the US, and presumably important for Motorola; yet they couldn't or wouldn't muster better staffing.