Hulu said Sunday that it will roll out two new shows between now and summer, while bringing back a third it debuted last year. The new shows include a half-hour scripted comedy about a dysfunctional Senate campaign, dubbed “Battleground,” beginning in February, and a travelogue show from director Richard Linklater.

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“We haven’t pushed it real hard in business, and it’s being grabbed out of our hands,” Steve Jobs said last year. “And I talk to people everyday in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads, all the way from boards of directors that are shipping iPads around instead of board books, down to nurses and doctors in hospitals and other large and small businesses.”

If Apple’s not pushing the iPad into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Carried in by the rank and file–just as smartphones were. Employees are buying iPads, and other mobile devices as well, and enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end and sometimes even subsidizing them, or their use.

In other words, the consumer market has evolved into a de facto evangelist for Apple in enterprise, a lucky development for the company, which is uniquely positioned to benefit from it.

“This trend should mean that the key to corporate success over the long term is being strong in consumer devices that you use everyday,” says Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes. “As a result, the purchase pattern is shifting toward laptops, tablets and smart phones being bought by consumers (all key areas of Apple’s strength), while direct sales of corporate products have shorter and smaller upgrade cycles. We call this trend the “Consumerization of IT,” which benefits companies with strong consumer appeal and customer service reputations….We believe Apple has a large lead in terms of driving this trend, while it presents challenges for traditional PC vendors, in our opinion. We believe the iPad’s success in the enterprise will help Apple make further inroads into the corporate market with other products eventually.”

Interesting, this vision of the iPad as Apple’s Trojan Horse for enterprise, particularly since it appears to be a natural evolution of the consumer market. And if it accelerates corporate adoption of the device as well as other Apple hardware over the long term–well then, it truly is magical and revolutionary.

Certainly the hardware and OS seem formidable enough to at least differentiate the device in an increasingly crowded market. And if HP’s integration story proves to be as good in practice as it sounded on stage in San Francisco yesterday (printers, phones, PCs and tablets all connected via webOS), the TouchPad could mount a decent challenge to the iPad–even if it doesn’t arrive at market until after the debut of the iPad 2.

Though he feels the summer ship date is just too late, Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes was impressed by the TouchPad’s hardware and OS. “[The TouchPad] appears to have very good software and syncing capabilities (HP Synergy feature) and some promising features,” he said in a client note today. “Also we point out that HP is clearly still investing not just in tablets but its smartphone business, which provides a good link between products for the future. Along with a nice OS, we believe that HP’s channel strength, link to its printing franchise, and overall brand strength could enable it to be one of the few relevant tablet players far behind Apple over the long-term.”

J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz had good things to say as well. “Our initial take on the TouchPad: better than expected,” he said. “Beyond Apple’s iPad, we previously had not been impressed with the other tablet entrants. HP’s TouchPad moderately changes this view.”

Interstingly, Moskowitz doesn’t seem quite as concerned about the device’s launch date. His feeling is that with the TouchPad, HP isn’t taking on Apple as much as it is the conga line of vendors chasing it. “For HP,” he said, “we believe the initial mission is to capture meaningful share among the non-iPad tablets, i.e., Android and Windows-based devices.”

Which is an interesting way of looking at the company’s strategy. Perhaps HP isn’t trying to out iPad the iPad–it’s trying to out iPad the iPad’s imitators, a far less daunting task.

It’s a note to the European company’s select group of freeloading American users, letting them know they’re going to have to start paying sooner or later. And it says Spotify is “looking forward” to a U.S. launch in ‘the coming months.”

From: Spotify
Date: February 8, 2011
To: xxx
Subject: Spotify Payment Problem- ACTION REQUIRED!

Hello from Spotify!

You are one of only a few people who has access to a Spotify promotional test account in the USA, and we hope you’re enjoying listening to Spotify through our Premium or Unlimited service.

We are really looking forward to launching the service in full in the USA over the coming months, and hope that you will continue to use the service and be one of our key advocates.

We need to make some small system changes to our payment system for our USA launch, and so in order to make the transition for you as smooth as possible, we have credited your Spotify account with 1 month worth of FREE Spotify Premium/ Unlimited!

In return for this, we ask that you please do the following:

• Visit our website https://www.spotify.com/account/subscription/change-payment/
• Login with your username and password.
• Select a payment method (Card or Paypal) and click ‘Change’
• Click ‘I Accept/ Continue’ to accept the new product in US Dollars
• Provide us with your payment details once more, so that after your FREE
month has expired you will be able to keep listening to music through Spotify.

Your next bill is due to us on ’14/02/12′, so please provide us with your payment details before then, otherwise you will revert back to Spotify Free and if you have Premium you will lose access to Spotify on your mobile. On this date, you will then be billed in Dollars!

Thanks for your help, and please feel free to reply to us directly if you have any
questions!

Obviously this note isn’t anything like a confirmed launch date. In order to do that, Spotify needs U.S. deals with the big music labels, and so far only has Sony signed on.

Industry sources keep telling me a deal with EMI is this close, but they’ve been saying that for weeks now. Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Just that it hasn’t yet.

And no matter what happens with EMI, Spotify can’t go anywhere unless it has Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label, on board. Again, lots of people tell me they’re confident a deal will get done soon, but…

In any case, the note does point out one of the reasons so many plugged-in Americans you know are raving about Spotify, even though the service doesn’t formally exist here–Spotify has quite cleverly been handing out free test accounts to lots and lots of people who might rave about it.

That includes VIPs and their families, all sorts of music industry people and media people, including yours truly.

And if you’re getting Spotify in the U.S., you are indeed getting a really, really good service: Free, unlimited music, anywhere you want it, whenever you want it, without ads.

Which is not what Spotify’s “real” users actually get. The ones who use the free service have a cap on the number of hours they can listen for free, can only listen on their PCs and will encounter a smattering of advertising. To get the real deal–mobile, no ads, no limits–they’ll need to cough up the equivalent of about $13.50 a month.

So far, about a million people are doing just that, people familiar with the company tell me. But how many will go for it if, or when, it gets to the U.S.?

The policy is effective immediately and is intended to ensure that average data users aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users. Says Verizon, “If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.”

What constitutes an “extraordinary amount of data”? Verizon doesn’t say, but I’m sure its subscribers will know it when they hit it, because their speeds will drop for almost two billing cycles.

And to think that just a few weeks ago, Verizon was talking up its plan to offer iPhone buyers a $30 unlimited data plan. Evidently it applies to the amount of data only, not the rate at which it’s downloaded.

Verizon says the shift in policy has nothing to do with the looming debut of the iPhone (“There’s nothing magic about the timing.”), which is widely known to tax carrier networks. But the timing here makes it hard to believe. This is Verizon bracing itself for the iPhone data deluge.

But until then, here are the reasons the Daily won’t work, followed by the reasons it will. They’re both from the same guy–Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan. From his note published yesterday:

CONS:

1. Consumer Acceptance Could Take Time: Nobody really knows the future of the iPad daily, and the official launch party is not “where the rubber meets the road” in terms of understanding consumer acceptance of such a new concept.

2. Hype or Reality?: Hype does not necessarily translate into market share, revenue, or cash flow.

3. Control: Apple tends to control its environment so tightly that there may be clashes down the road with apps offered by Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, AOL, Amazon, and a host of other Internet companies. This could reduce overall profit potential for iPad publishers.

4. Understanding the revenue model will be key. Online ad networks and other intermediaries could be left on the outside, looking in, if the iPad remains a premium offering with high CPMs. The subscription model is somewhat irrelevant unless it scales to support a vibrant advertising environment. We will have to wait and see on that key point.

PROS:

1. Product Differentiation: News Corp could marshal the resources of its newspaper, cable television, studio, and Internet divisions to differentiate the product from most other companies.

2. Apple is a powerful ally. The recent track record of product innovation and commercialization at Apple is unmatched. If Apple is willing to throw its weight behind this initiative, along with News Corp, then the chances of success are high.

3. Playing Offense: If News Corp can make an iPad daily work, then other media companies will begin to play offense as well. And that is generally a good thing for innovation, and ultimately for advertisers and marketers alike.

4. Makes More Sense than Wired for iPad: Mid last year, we attended a pre-launch event for Wired magazine’s iPad initiative, which Conde Naste marketed at a surprising $5 per copy. The product was beautiful, but results were mixed at best. And it was a monthly, not a daily, which implied that the frequency of visitation was much lower.

Rohan, by the way, is ultimately bullish on the Daily, and he was that way before he got a look at the thing at Rupert Murdoch’s apartment last night. Now he’s very, very bullish, but he’s been embargoed from talking about it until noon today.

The Daily’s formal unveiling will start an hour earlier, at 11 am ET, and I’ll be liveblogging then; check back here in a bit for a link.

Until then, you can check out this preview from CNN, which got an “unofficial sneak peak” [sic] at the Daily. Spoiler alert! It reads a lot like the preview I ran yesterday, written without the benefit of any peaking [sic].

(Disclosure: This site is also owned by News Corp. Which didn’t get me an invite to Murdoch’s party or, per above, any advance look-sees).

[CLICK HERE FOR LIVE COVERAGE OF THE PRESS EVENT]
But a select crowd will get to see the iPad newspaper tonight, at an equally notable Manhattan location: Rupert Murdoch’s apartment, where the News Corp. CEO is hosting a “low key” cocktail party.

Although News Corp. owns this Web site, my email invite to tonight’s pre-launch launch event hasn’t arrived, and I’m told it never will. The company hasn’t offered me a peek at the Daily, either.

But at this point I’ve still got a pretty decent sense of what Murdoch’s guests will see this evening, and the rest of us will see tomorrow: A newspaper that’s both old-fashioned and cutting-edge.

People who have gotten up  close to the the Daily describe a digital paper where many of the news stories look just like news stories you’d see anywhere else.

Others will look more like iPhone apps, featuring interactive graphics or videos, or photos you can swipe, pinch and zoom–with perhaps almost no text at all.

And there’s more! There’s no 3-D video yet, though it’s on the agenda. But there will be an audio feature so you can have stories read aloud to you. And there’s a crossword puzzle! And Sudoku!

A Daily-watcher who thinks the thing is amazing compares it to the Daily Prophet, the magical newspaper read by Harry Potter and his wizard pals.

More jaded observers tell me it’s more or less what they’ve seen in existing iPad magazine apps, particularly Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and Condé Nast’s Wired. The big difference is that those magazines come out monthly, and the Daily will get beamed to your iPad… daily.

Still, the most striking thing about the Daily has nothing to do with any technical bells and whistles. It’s Murdoch’s insistence that he can sell a digital newspaper app to consumers trained to expect that digital news is what you get on the Web, for free.

The Daily is almost defiantly anti-Web: It will have a free site, with a grudging sample of perhaps 10 percent of the newspaper’s stories, but that’s it. While Web news sites increasingly focus on aggregation and filtering of other people’s content, the Daily will focus on making its own stuff, even though plenty of other people are already doing it.

And while News Corp. officials have tried to argue that the Daily isn’t a newspaper but something else, it is most definitely produced using a newspaper model: Six sections, written once a day–the Daily team is particularly excited about its sports coverage–and delivered in the wee hours of the morning.

The Daily will allow for some midday updates, but it’s really designed to land with a digital thud on your virtual doorstep, just like the newspapers Murdoch has loved all his life.

Murdoch will charge 99 cents a week for a subscription, and he’s certainly going to get some takers at the start, especially since the Daily will be free for the first two weeks after tomorrow’s launch.

Which will be a noisy one. The press will give it plenty of free promotion, and News Corp. will augment that with a digital ad campaign, in addition to offline marketing donated and/or bartered from other Murdoch properties. Perhaps there’s a way to mention it once or twice during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast on Fox.

Much more important will be the endorsement from Apple, which is using the Daily to roll out a new “push” subscription feature.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was supposed to appear onstage in San Francisco with Murdoch to bless the launch, will send content boss Eddy Cue to New York tomorrow instead.

That’s still Apple’s seal of approval, though, and I can’t think of another time the company has so conspicuously blessed a single third-party product. That alone will be enough to prompt an enormous number of people to try it out.

Remember that Apple already has a customer base of  some 125 million iTunes users–if you do want to buy this thing, you won’t need to pull out a credit card. A few button clicks will do.

The real question, of course, is how many people are going to pay for the Daily a month down the road, when the buzz is gone. And there’s no way to guess at that when you get your first look at the thing. No matter when that happens.

“Tablet was the focus, but the changes we did also free it up to be more flexible for other contexts as well,” Honeycomb lead designer Matias Duarte told Mobilized. “It’s about really eliminating all the barriers to all the different kinds of form factors that people might want to interact with.”

Google plans to show off its work with Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, at an event on Wednesday. There, it will talk about the specific changes it has made, as well as the vision behind the shift.

Duarte, who joined Google from Palm last year, said there were really three major areas of focus. Clearly one was to change the way Android worked so that it was suited to devices larger than a phone. But beyond that, Duarte said, Honeycomb was about evolving Android to be better overall at mobile computing tasks. Finally, Duarte said, Honeycomb is designed to make the operating system more usable.

“All of those are works in progress,” he said. “Our work is far from done in any of those.”

One of the most notable changes in Honeycomb is the fact that it no longer has a reliance on physical hardware buttons. That paves the way for all kinds of devices, Duarte said.

“Some of them might look more like a laptop…some of them might not even have soft buttons,” Duarte said. “They might be purely gesturally driven.”

The first Honeycomb devices, however, will all be tablets, starting with the Motorola Xoom, which is headed to Verizon in February.

But, if he has done his job right, Duarte said that hardware makers will be able to create devices that Google never even contemplated. “Whatever they come up with, the most important thing is that we have given that flexibility.”

That could range to attaching Android to a refrigerator or creating products aimed at a specific demographic, such as young kids or the elderly. Heck, someone could even use Android to build a big table computer to take on Microsoft’s Surface. “I can’t see why not,” Duarte said. “I can imagine that.”

As for the potential tablets in particular, Duarte notes that those who initially brushed aside Apple’s iPad when it debuted a year ago underestimated the impact of what Apple did in bringing the multi-touch screen to a larger-size device.

“I think those skeptics were short-sighted,” Duarte said. “That’s the genius of what Apple achieved with that iPad.”

The tablet experience, he said, is largely about the touch interface, which changes people’s relationship with the content they are viewing. In moving the content into a closer and more comfortable position, people relate more and have more emotional experiences, he said.

“People have seen screens that size and have been taking screens that size to bed with them and to their coffee shops with them. They’ve been sitting with them hunched over and in all kinds of contorted positions” Duarte said. “But having that touch interface means that you can interact with the Internet or with a book or with a video player in a totally different posture, in a totally different way. It changes how you engage with the content, how long you engage with the content and even how emotionally close you are to it.”

With Honeycomb, Duarte said, he wanted to make sure that Google was opening Android up to enable those kinds of experiences, but also improving the underpinnings of the operating system to be a more powerful computing experience.

One of the changes, he said, is recognizing that people use tablets differently than they use their phone, even if they are running many of the same types of programs.

“It used to be that Android was something that you held in your hand and you would use in these relatively fine slices of time throughout the day, and then when you sit down at a table or a desk or you go home, that Android stays in your pocket or goes in a charger,” he said. “Now your experience with Android is alternating between these fine slices and these longer periods….So we need to think of Android as an experience that you have 24/7, throughout the entire day. What that means is that you are doing a lot more and you are doing a lot more for longer periods of time.”

That shift, he said, means that the operating system needs to do a better job of shifting between tasks and notifying users of what things are going on in the background. With Honeycomb, Duarte said, Google is improving its recent application switching feature that lets users easily see the places they have been working and point to them, while at the same time getting better notifications from background activities without being constantly interrupted.

Duarte characterized Honeycomb as the biggest change since the debut of Android, but it is also the latest in a series of updates that have come in rapid succession. In many cases, both device makers and wireless carriers have struggled to keep pace with Google, often failing to allow their devices to stay updated with Google’s latest and greatest, even if the phones themselves were capable of being upgraded.

But while others wonder whether Google is moving too quickly in evolving Android, Duarte said he wonders why the rest of the industry is moving so slowly, and promises even faster change to come.

“Using computers suck, to this day,” Duarte said. “It’s one of my daily frustrations that the rate of change in computing experiences is so slow.”

In particular, Duarte said that the basic interaction with programs and files hasn’t changed much. “It’s the same way I did [things] in high school on a Mac Plus.”

One piece of that shift, Durate said, is evolving our expectations of computing devices from a world in which computer users put in information and turn a crank to get a result to one that more resembles an ongoing dialogue.

“What I am looking for is that sense that you get when jazz musicians improvise together,” he said. “The computer should be doing things in concert with you, in support [of] you, not acting like a servant waiting for commands and then returning with results. That’s a little aspirational, I know.”

Honeycomb will get the company partway to that vision, but Duarte said much of that work will reveal itself over time. But make no mistake, he said–although they don’t appear to be the stuff of science fiction, computers are starting to become extensions of the human brain.

“People always think of cybernetics with computers as being this thing that happens far in the future, and you have Star Trek, Borg-like scary things” Duarte said. “But the way computers are used today through social networking, through email, through accessing information like Google–they are already becoming [those] cybernetic parts of our mind.”

“The improvement of iPad 2′s display focuses on thickness and anti-reflection, not resolution,” Ming-Chi claims, adding that the device’s display module is 30 to 35 percent thinner than that of the iPad 1 and will eliminate some of the glare that some critics claim makes it difficult to read in bright sunlight.

Either way, this canonical categorizing of the multiplicity of slates and e-readers by CEA Chief Economist and Director of Research Shawn DuBravac is pretty stunning. There are more than 100 in all, and they run the gamut from Panasonic’s diminutive 4-inch VieraTablet to Kno’s dual-14-inch-screen device. DuBravac has helpfully broken them out according to OEM, screen size and operating system (note the proliferation of Android tablets). Notably absent: Any data on pricing and availability, which isn’t too suprising since only a portion of the tablets on this list will ever need it, particularly with the iPad 2, Research In Motion’s PlayBook and whatever webOS creations Hewlett-Packard’s Palm division has cooked up headed to market.

Chart and data courtesy Shawn Dubravac

“The data shows PlayBook appealing to early adopters and power users, given its differentiation from iPad,” Abramsky told clients, noting that six percent of the survey group said they were “likely” to buy a PlayBook. Of those, one percent were “very likely” and the remaining five percent “somewhat likely.”

So six percent of respondents are very/somewhat likely to buy the PlayBook once it becomes available. That’s about half the level of interest expressed in a similar survey of iPad-buying intentions ahead of that device’s debut last year. And Apple ended up selling 14.8 million iPads in 2010, far beyond analyst consensus estimates of 3.3 million. So Abramsky four- to six-million forecast might not be that far off–assuming the PlayBook proves to be all that RIM claims.

That said, the tablet market today is very different than it was prior to the iPad’s debut. And with the legion of new tablets headed to market, including the iPad 2, Abramsky’s forecast could prove optimistic. Remember, despite the leverage of RIM’s installed base and the promise of the BlackBerry’s security and manageability, the PlayBook is still missing some of the platform elements that have made the iPad so successful–a thriving apps ecosystem, a vertically integrated platform and iTunes.

*Barbara Stymiest, chief operating officer at RBC Financial Group, sits on RIM’s board of directors. RBC also makes a market in RIM Securities.

A data-service pricing document leaked to Engadget suggests Verizon has scrapped its $15-for-150MB plan, leaving a mandatory $30-per-month unlimited data plan as the sole option for “feature phones and 3G smartphones” like the iPhone. Note the specificity of that designation–it excludes upcoming LTE handsets, which will presumably debut with higher, tiered data-pricing plans.

Meanwhile, rival AT&T continues to offer the iPhone with two capped data plans–200MB for $15 a month, and 2GB for $25.

[Image Credit: Engadget]

Now, the five-person start-up is racing to rapidly improve its second program, a panorama photo-taking app called 360.

The app uses the iPhone’s video-recording feature to create an immersive panoramic photo (see YouTube video to really get a sense for what it does). I’ve used it a bunch in recent months to capture everything from interior scenes of the Boston Library to a snowy Copley Square to shots of Stanford’s women’s basketball team snapping UConn’s 90-game winning streak. The app debuted at the end of July, mere weeks after the team sold RedLaser to eBay.

However, the Occipital team feels a renewed urgency to add a bunch of features quickly. In December, Microsoft offered a demo of a similar technology it hopes to add into its Bing for iPhone app.

What the 360 app does well, said co-founder Jeff Powers, is create such panoramas quickly and easily. However, the options to share that panorama are limited, especially if one wants to share an immersive photo as opposed to just an unrolled flat image. Also, one of the downsides of the app’s speeds is that it only captures a part of the scene once, meaning it misses out on the opportunities to improve on that initial image with additional data. Also, unless a user is particularly skilled, there can be visible seams within the panorama.

Powers said the company hopes to address all of those issues in the next release.

“We’re trying to satiate that exact urge to capture the scene and share it with other people,” Powers said in an interview. “We’ve nailed the ‘It’s really fast and easy [part]‘; we havent nailed the ‘It’s really good quality and easy to share’ part.”

Powers said he is also hoping to get the next version of 360 out in the coming months, “hopefully before they [Microsoft] come out with whatever they come out with and before any others.”

Occipital, which grew out of the TechStars Boulder program, also hopes eventually to bring 360 to other mobile devices.

“We’re very very interested in Android,” Powers said. One of the challenges, though, is 360 works very closely with the phone’s camera. With the iPhone, that only means understanding one or two different models, as compared to dozens of Android phones–meaning lots of extra support and development time.

“It is a big endeavor to support all of these devices,” Powers said.

The company also hopes to create an expanded Web presence, beyond a current gallery of 360-created panoramas.

As for Microsoft, it says its panorama feature is still a prototype, with no firm date for when it will be added to the Bing iPhone app.

At the December event, Microsoft’s Blaise Agueras y Arcas demonstrated Bing’s forthcoming panorama abilities in a video interview with Mobilized.

“This is still experimental, but we are coming out with it very soon,” he said.

Here is the video that shows what the 360 app can do:

“The BlackBerry PlayBook is expected to begin shipping in the U.S. in Q1,” RIM said in an email statement.

And there you have it.

Meanwhile, the device is garnering mixed reviews at CES. After some hands-on time with it, Engadget described the PlayBook as “blazingly fast, comfortable to hold, and intuitive to use.” Gizmodo liked it as well, talking up its hardware, responsive display and UI. “RIM’s got something here that could really stand on top of the bajillion other crappy tablets that are going to launch this year,” the site concluded. “They just have to take it the rest of the way.”

Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Robison agreed. “RIM’s PlayBook strategy [is] exceptionally compelling— pending successful execution,” he wrote in a note from CES. “The company’s ace card in tablets is sure-fire security for IT departments who loathe adding another piece of client software to enterprise networks.”

But others, like Wedge Partners analyst and RIM bear Brian Blair, were not so impressed. Though he praised the device’s sturdy build and crisp screen, he slagged its lack of native email and calendar support.

“There is not a built-in e-mail program that we saw, nor is there a calendar: arguably the two most critical features of a Blackberry,” Blair said. “Calendar and Email are only available, if the PlayBook is “tethered” to a Blackberry. Short of that, users need to use the browser for e-mail and calendar.”

And, admittedly, that does seem silly. Unless you’re a CIO. In which case, you probably prefer to push data (and remotely wipe it, if necessary) from one device instead of two, and appreciate the gesture.

Still, Blair came away with the impression that the PlayBook isn’t yet fully baked, and to be fair, it isn’t–after all, this is a pre-release device.

“We know this is an early build and that bugs are being worked through over the next couple of months, but nearly every feature we tried on our demo unit was having problems,” he concluded. “The video player froze and the games wouldn’t play. The only thing that worked was the ‘Coverflow-like’ scrolling of the different applications, which the device did with ease.”

But as Blair himself observed, a lot can change in three months. And presumably RIM is doing its damndest to ensure that it does–before Apple debuts the iPad 2, which will undoubtedly become the new standard against which all tablets are compared.

In the meantime, here are a few PlayBook promo videos RIM released in conjunction with CES.

“Currently, we have no plans to introduce Google’s latest Android handset,’’ KT spokesman Lee In-won told the Korea Times. Evidently, SK Telecom–the country’s largest carrier–holds a similar view, and the reason seems to be the tight control Google is exerting over the device’s local marketing and customization. SK officials, for example, say they’re having difficulty getting SK’s T-Map navigation service onto the Nexus S.

With the S, Google has taken a dim view of the overlays and carrier add-ons that often mar the Android experience, adding little benefit while undermining its usability. Presumably, the difficulties to which SK refers are the result of this. If the Nexus S is to be pure Android, Google can’t allow its carrier partners to compromise by piling crapware and inferior pay services atop it, can it?

As of this writing, Google has not responded to requests for comment.