There are plain vanilla and customised versions. A typical plain vanilla or pure Android version is the Google Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 7 tablet. Typical phones with a highly customised version of Android are the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.
There are other pure Android phones, like the HTC One Google Play Edition, but there really aren't that many. This is because there are lots of phones and tablets all with very similar specifications.
One of the easiest ways that phone and tablet manufacturers can make their devices stand out from the crowd is by heavily customising the interface and operating system. Google lets you do that whereas Apple doesn't.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is loaded up with extras and the disadvantage is that they use up a lot of memory. There have been complaints about the limited amount of memory on the phone and you only get around 9GB free out of 16GB installed. That's around 7GB for the operating system and bundled software. Compare this to a Google Nexus 7, which uses around half this for the OS. However, Samsung does give you a nice bundle of extras and the HTC One comes with nice customisations too.
Assuming you don't mind losing a bit of memory, why wouldn't you want the extra apps and functions on these devices? One reason is that new versions of Android are pushed out to plain vanilla pure Android devices before others. I'm on the next version of Android with my Google Nexus a month or more before Samsung users get it.
There have already been reports of Android 4.3 in use, although I suspect that they are simply test versions. My Nexus 7 reports that Android 4.2.2 is the latest version. It is usually among the first devices to get new versions though, so it shouldn't be long before it gets an upgrade.
If you want to be at the cutting edge of Android operating systems, get a pure Android device.
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