It's Now or Never with Motorola

[droidman101]

The only way people have found a way around this is to go into the phone and remove something, then rewire it, and then try to get through to bootloader. Once they get through to the bootloader they'll have to flash a recovery and then, finallly, they'll have a chance to develop and use roms. This will take around a year at least.

I can see the thread titles now...

"Help - My phone is bricked! Accidentally spliced the wrong wire... Can I reflash the .sbf to fix this?"

In which case wed be like: ok put it all together, bring it to vzw and tell them it doesn't work, they'll just get u a new one. If not, we told u it was dangerous anyways if they spliced the wrong wire, they still wouldn't even have gotten to bootloader so they couldn't have flashed an sbf in the first place.

 

[droidman101]

Let me put this into another perspective then. Regardless if you or anyone else roots a phone or installs a custom ROM the ability to do so should remain unchanged. What Motorola is doing by encrypting the boot loader and putting an Efuse on it is more or less telling you, the consumer, that the money you spent on their phone is a "right to use" the device rather than "right to OWN" the device. Which by all respectable standards is absolute B.S.

That's a good point - kind of like the good ol' car analogy. I sure wouldn't want my dealer telling me I can't put a new engine in the car if I want to (not that I'd have a clue how!).

I guess part of the problem is that, in America anyway, the phones are so tied to the service and the carrier, that the public's perception is not one of true ownership, like a car, or a home, or whatever. I guess technology and electronics, such as our phones, are so new (in the bigger historical picture) that our culture is not accustomed to thinking of them as something that can even be customized. Most people know you can do whatever you want to your car if you're willing to go to the trouble, same with a house, or a boat, or even a computer nowadays to a certain extent. But the thought of that on a phone doesn't even really enter into people's minds; therefore, any limitations on that possibility also don't enter into anybody's minds.

Point is that these are no longer just phones. They are fully functional handheld computers that can make phone calls. The fact that a Nexus, Droid, etc... can not only run Android but Linux as well and more than likely Meego goes to show that this statement is true. These devices have far surpassed the computing power of most low end netbooks from two years ago. Why then should we be limited to what we can do with our own devices? I am now wondering if there are any legal ramifications to this? Simply put knowing that the device is capable of running multiple operating systems can the manufacturer dictate what can and cannot be run on it? Just like you cannot be forced to run Windows, Linux, BSD etc... on your hardware and you cannot be told to keep the default OS load and factory bloat does the same apply to a "smartphone"? Looks like it may be time for me to write some more letters to find out.

Its funny, because like two weeks ago someone was able to port ubuntu to the hd2...sucked because it was a port but I mean if its able to have software designed for a real computer it must be a computer...