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It is hard to imagine how a smartphone today wouldn’t come with a Google search system provided within it. After all, Google leads the pack of search engines by leaps and bounds above Yahoo and  Bing. But this is what Verizon is doing with the newly launched Samsung Fascinate, as it has done in the past with other phones. The Samsung Fascinate, recently released, is a smartphone powered by Google’s Android but makes Bing the default search engine. If one even looks for a Google search option on their phone, it won’t be found. This has numerous customers angry. So why did Verizon do it?

It comes down to money and Microsoft apparently was willing to pay Verizon to replace Google Search with Bing. Consumers are angry because they feel Verizon doesn’t have their interests at heart as much as their own bottom line. The deal between Verizon Wireless and Microsoft was reported to be between $ 550 million to $ 650 million over a five year period. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal exempts Android handsets, such as Droid, from the provision that Bing become the default search engine on Verizon mobile devices. Right now Verizon Wireless is the largest wireless carrier in the US with 89 million subscribers.

So Verizon made the deal and began installing the Bing app on a large number of their devices, including BlackBerry from the server side. When people started to notice prior to the Samsung recent Samsung release, there were a lot of complaints sent to the company. Verizon stated that they wanted their customers to now have easier access to context-relevant searches; this is why they used Bing.  Verizon promised that with Bing customers would have a large variety of choices in the packages they were installing. Customers didn’t think so – feeling with the push toward Bing and the lack of Google gave them actually fewer choices.

People were possibly angrier at being pushed into the decision rather than given a choice or even being alerted that all they were going to get when they made a purchase was the Bing app.

So how does the Samsung Fascinate relate to all of this? This is one of Verizon’s newest releases and yes, it is doing the same thing  – no Google. By now, people have discovered how to override the default apps and put in a navigator app for Google, but does this make it right? Will consumers continue to put up with this? Maybe, as people are loving the Fascinate. The phone has been compared to be a midway point between HTC’s Droid Incredible and the Motorola Droid X. It has a 4-inch screen, which is a size bigger than the Incredible and a size smaller than the Droid X. The Fascinate has 2 GB of internal storage and 16 GB on MicroSD. The battery is said to be better than competitors with a n 1500 mAh.

Could the Fascinate have sold more versions had Verizon not made the deal with Microsoft to push out Google? It is hard to tell. It is even more difficult to see what Verizon will do now? Will they pull the Bing icon from the webpage; will they download the free Google search client and put it on the homepage or bury it? Will they continue putting out new phones minus the Google app? They made a deal and as the largest carrier in the US, will their customers feel betrayed enough to drop them or deal with it?

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