Motorola Responds to DROID X Bootloader Lock

Great they still missed one the most attractive elements of owning a droid....

HTC Evo with Cyanogen FTW!

**** you Motorola, if you really supported openness, you would not do this kind of dirty trick. At least we consumers can vote with our dollars, I will not buy any further Motorola devices until they change their attitude on this (speaking as a current Droid owner).

I'm sure someone's going to find a way around this pretty fast.

Gotta say I am a little disappointed. Although many months away till my phone decision is ultimately chosen, I am leaning towards an Evo. Does this mean the Droid being released at the year is going to have the same 'issue'?

This is why motorala fails. Openness is just what it is... I.E. "the ability to choose" If we wanted this we would all be apple fagboys. I will stick with my nexus one thks.

Holy cow, lets add another reason to why the Pre is better than droid. Even though it's old technology I'd STILL buy one over a droid (oh, and the superior multitasking management helps). Preware has to be the easiest way to get homebrew on a mobile phone.

"allows circuits to be physically altered at the silicon level on demand"
That's not bricking?

Guys, this really isn't that different then other phones put out by Motorola.

The only reason we have root on the original droid is that there was a bug in their code that authenticated the signed updated (it was a loop that incremented by the wrong amount), and we exploited it to gain root. The only difference with the original droid is that it didn't have a signed bootloader. However, compare that with the milestone which did have a signed boot loader and we got around that regardless.

Now that people know they wont brick their phones, the hacking community can go nuts on it and find some new and cleaver way to get root access.

I surprised they did not put a useless 2.5mm headphone jack in it

all the people that say ill stick with my pre or evo must realized..great your phone is unlocked..too bad your stuck on the sub par sprint network.....and who needs to unlock the phone anyways. I can do anything I want with my droid without unlocking the phone. Most the people complaining about it dont have a need to unlock it or gain root access anyways.

^ You have issues. Seek professional help.

Whatever... someone will find out how to block or reroute the check, or at least emulate "approved" software.

In the mean time, I'm totally not buying this until that happens or until Motorola remembers what Android is and what it has meant to the majority of its users since day one. Whichever comes first.

why would motorola care about locking their hardware? btw this is vzw's call, not motorola's

Its probably a series of e-fuses, similar to what the xbox 360 uses. When it fails it blows 1. Then blows another one when its correct again mitigating the effect of the first one. On and on it goes. This is almost fool proof, but is beatable as is proven with modded 360's. However, the technique was easy on a large device, on a highly integrated device such as a phone its likely to be very difficult, and not worth it. Frankly I dont know why Motorola cares, and it does seem to be only to make sure you keep their stuff on there for whatever reason.. probably agreements with facebook and what not, that will pay Motorola money to make sure every Droid X has their stuff on it by default. or their are simply being assholes.

The good thing, if you messed up with your phone accidentally "destroyed" the phone, the phone is guaranteed that it can be recovered.

The bad things is that this will take away almost all the advantages, fun, and freedom from owning an Android phone.


In my opinion :
I don't see the reason why Motorola should go into this kind of protection method.
All people who rooted or modifying their phones are non-regular users and already know the benefits and risks of loosing warranty by doing so but more importantly, they know what they are doing.
Ordinary user will never do that.
This protection method is not even necessary.

Sorry, I do not see an issue with what Motorola did. In most cases this was a requirement from Verizon.

But honestly, at the end of the day, if the phone works without any problems and Motorola did not block developers from creating content/apps/etc there is no problem here.

Most won't even be affected by this as they will never consider/know about/want to flash their phone this way. Sorry to say but those they are offending are in the extreme minority of users. A point of a percent of overall purchasers.

Eh I went and looked at the droid x this weekend in person and it seemed kinda cheap if you ask me.

The four buttons on the front did not look they would withstand much use before giving out.

Overall unimpressed.

Motorola phones have always been a pain in the butt for me. Had 3 of them, and never again.

"Motorola confirmed the discovery in a recent statement. "The technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software," Motorola said."

""Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at http://developer.motorola.com," the company added."


So in other words: We are doing this for your safety. We are doing this to benefit you. Yeah, thanks but I'm not a ten year old child and can think and act for myself. So much for open source, apparently Motorola has no concept of what that means, and thinks its potential customers are stupid enough to buy into what Motorola's definition of open source is.

Uh... no.

All they did was load the boot loader up. To hack into it would mean that we would have a way to install our own bootloader instead of that one, and could thus have full control of the phone.

yeah... that's horse shit.

seems to me that most people are overreacting to this, 99.8% of the world could care less, including myself. I have been looking into doing this with my droid and honestly haven't found 1 thing I would gain to make it worth my time. For those of you who want custom ROMS just buy a phone that allows it, simple as that.

"The company added that checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats."

Yeah because Mal ware is always trying to install malicious ROM's without you noticing >.>

Bet a hundred bucks this came from Verizon to protect their right to rip you off for tethering.

Cool one

quite frankly, I don't get it. Can someone please explain what this means? How will this affect my experience with the Droid X??