HTC To Unlock Smartphones' Bootloader 166
An anonymous reader writes "From information taken from a facebook post from HTC's page, it looks like future [HTC] Android devices will have an unlocked bootloader. An email sent by HTC's co-founder also confirms that the Evo 3D will be unlocked. This is great news for the Android modding community."
They must have felt the 'heat' (Score:4, Interesting)
HTC must have felt the heat from Samsung since they (Samsung) indicted that their devices would be 'root enabled' by default.
it is sad though, that HTC appears to be paying [businessinsider.com] at least US$5 to Microsoft for their patents...one more reason for me to avoid HTC.
Kudos to them though, for acting fast, which is an attribute most successful companies have. Compare that to what Microsoft would have done.
Re:Hello Moto? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? Check out the XDA Developer's Forum for the Milestone [xda-developers.com] - this is only one Moto phone and there are over 28.5K posts in this forum. Even if that IS only 0.5% of their installed base outside of the USA (because the original Droid has an unlocked bootloader in the US, but was called the Milestone and locked tight everywhere else) that's still not a small amount of interest in non-standard ROMs.
If Motorola wants to keep everything locked down like an iphone they're of course welcome to do so. I really think that they'd do well to just offer an option to unlock the bootloader to whatever percentage of their userbase asks for it, along with voiding their warranty of course. It's not going to hurt anything if they do and they'll only reap goodwill and more fans because of it. We may be a minority but we're a vocal minority, and currently we'll all buy a non-moto phone when it comes time for our next purchase.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to push customers away, but then again I'm not a huge hardware company so there are probably many more factors involved in the decision. I'm only speaking as a disgruntled customer who will do my best to prevent anyone I know from getting a Motorola product from here on in. It's a safe bet that I'm not alone.
Re:Hello Moto? (Score:5, Interesting)
He may not be, I've run into some Android users who are decidedly not tech savvy who have rooted their HTC devices and they tell their friends building a wave of support for rooting phones. This is almost exclusively for HTC Android phones and most frequently I field questions about how to do it and can I "fix" their phones since I'm the tech savvy guy in the office. Typically the rooted phones are faster, more stable, and have more features, some of which can be killer.
That said I think HTC is doing this in large part because they HAVE seen people run from Motorola's locked down phones at the rapid rate (and this is backed up by motorola starting to make noise about unlocking theirs too). Not to mention if HTC can partner with the community they can use that work as a resource for releasing stronger offerings for their phones that will really put them ahead of the competition.
Re:Hello Moto? (Score:4, Interesting)
Googling for phone jailbreaks puts the figures (taken from monitorig websites) at around 5% in 2008 and 8% in 2009. I saw guesses for 2011 or around 10-15%.The company that supplies phones to our work actually offers to jailbreak iPhones for us if necessary.
Now, Android devices have a lot less need of jailbreaking of course, but their users are generally more technically aware, so I don't think it's a stretch at all to assume that easily more than 1 of Android devices are being cracked. I've rooted 3 out of 4 of my Android devices, and may do my Xoom if a nice custom ROM comes out for it (probably already are some available).