HTC: no more locked-down phones

It's been a consistent pattern: The telco mass-purchases an otherwise reasonable smartphone but then SIM-locks it to work only with that one telco, and in some cases Carrier ID-locks it so that its bootloader will refuse to boot if you have reflashed the firmware, and justifies that sort of customer-control on grounds that they've financially subsidised the low retail price. Which of course they then make back through jacked-up service rates and deliberate lack of competition because the customer feels locked in.

Fair enough. End-run that entire syndrome by eschewing the telco as a hardware vendor. Plenty of decent smartphones are available at only slightly higher pricepoints from elsewhere (including their actual manufacturers) with fewer or no lockdown measures.

As Bruce points out, there's still some amount of proprietary bullshit, even at that, so work remains to be done (as is common with embedded Linux).

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com