18 ms·

HTC sides with consumers: No more locked bootloaders in Android phones

402 points by drivebyacct2 15y ago

drivebyacct2 15y ago
After much consumer push back against locked bootloaders in new devices, HTC has (apparently) decided to discontinue the policy. This arrives just after Motorola makes some unsubstantiated comment about reconsidering the policy. For some history, the Droid 1 was very open and easy to flash with custom ROMs. It's European brother, the Milestone, featured on-chip security that verified the signature of the bootloader which in turn verified the signature of various boot files including the linux kernel at the heart of Android. Subsequent Motorola devices in the US featured similar security and thus do not have official CM7 builds. HTC recently adopted a similar strategy with respect to some of their more recent phones. The Thunderbolt had a buggy implementation though, and was still hacked quite quickly. The Evo 3d (And another? maybe?) featured a fixed version that more closely represented the impenetrable Motorola style bootloader. Anyway, it appears now, that they maybe embracing the community more, which makes me happy. My mom won't stop talking about how fast her Droid OG is. I put CM7 on it which includes Gingerbread... a treat her phone would have never otherwise seen. Meaning it also includes a fix for an awful race condition that can make it impossible to answer phone calls. Good stuff all around. Also, for context, this is the statement Motorola made a month ago: http://ausdroid.net/2011/04/27/confirmation-motorola-to-unlock-bootloaders-for-future-android-devices/ http://ausdroid.net/2011/04/27/confirmation-motorola-to-unlo... They make very specific caveats for "where carriers allow it".
- ZoFreX 15y ago
  I'm a Milestone user and long-term customer of Motorola... I can't recommend against them enough. Their problems extend far beyond locked bootloaders, far more than following HTC on this issue would be required for Motorola to be worth dealing with.
rbranson 15y ago
More reasons HTC is my favorite phone manufacturer right now. After a bike accident left my Nexus One screen broken, $100 and a 4-day turnaround got me back on my feet. Thrilled. Maybe they'll drop the Sense UI from the stock phones. One can dream.
- joelackner 15y ago
  when htc improves their battery life (as far as the manufacturer can do) they'll be tops in my book.
  - blakerobinson 15y ago
    I had a pretty sweet extended battery for my Incredible thing lasted for well over a day with heavy voice and data usage. Sure it's not a fix from the manufacturer, but it worked out pretty well.
    - copper 15y ago
      > lasted for well over a day I've never had the spare money to buy a smartphone, but isn't that /ludicrously/ low? My cheap little nokia brick lasts (under normal usage) for a bit less than a week. Admittedly, the power drawn is not comparable, but I'd still think the manufacturers would try to give the users a somewhat longer battery life.
      - mceachen 15y ago
        It's not comparable at all. Every smartphone I've had (Palm Treo, Nokia, iPhone 3G, and now Droid X) has needed daily charging. The Droid is down to ~50-60% battery by the end of the day, unless I'm on the phone a lot. It's not a PITA to plug it in before I go to sleep. These things are full-on computers, in your pocket. Woot!
      - biafra 15y ago
        My Motorola Milestones battery lasts 3 days if I switch off mobile data (CM7). SMS and calls are still coming in.
      - merijnv 15y ago
        Not really, no. I had one of the original iPhones and with heavy 3G usage the battery drains like nobody's business (it barely lasted half a day if I used it to stream music on the train to work). Right now I have a HTC Dream (also known as the G1) which lasts slightly over a day. Newer iPhones and Androids seem to last a bit longer, but not much. Its the price you pay for internet connectivity...
runjake 15y ago
This is great news. The HTC CEO made a pretty quick and sudden decision. Meanwhile, Motorola vaguely semi-committed months ago and nothing has happened. I don't really buy that carriers are demanding this as Samsung currently doesn't do this.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  AFAIK The SGII is open, but I had heard rumors a while back from people I trusted that Samsung was headed in a similar direction. There's no reason to believe it, and with HTC taking a stand I'm hopeful.
- rodh257 15y ago
  I remember Paul Obrien tweeting that the GSII was really open, seemed to actively encourage modding. Twitter search is horibble so I can't find the tweet now though.
  - nfriedly 15y ago
    Just so you know, twitter's search only goes back a limited amount of time because its targeted at real-time results, not historical. Google with site:twitter.com might get better results.
bane 15y ago
Well, now I know who I'm buying my next phone from.
- jeffool 15y ago
  A million times this. But really, I probably wouldn't even consider it if the phones didn't have extra programs on them that ran pointlessly and/or I couldn't uninstall.
  - minalecs 15y ago
    well the whole point of having an unlocked bootloader is so it makes it easier to run custom roms. Most roms are aosp or stock that remove all the crap.
    - jeffool 15y ago
      Oh I get it. I just mean that, if it didn't have that stuff, I wouldn't be too concerned with running a custom rom, and the bootloader wouldn't be as big an issue.
akent 15y ago
Why was this announced via a post on Facebook? Don't they have a corporate blog or something?
- blakerobinson 15y ago
  HTC is a Chinese company, so even if there is a corporate blog, it's not directly hitting English speaking users. HTC probably saw this as its most direct path to that audience.
  - bmunro 15y ago
    Taiwanese, to be precise.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
bad_user 15y ago
This is exactly what I've been talking about -- customers want unlocked phones, and because with Android competition is tough, sooner or later unlocked phones will be the norm. Maybe not just yet, as I don't believe HTC or Motorola until I see it, but soon. I just bought a Galaxy because SG phones can be easily unlocked. That's a lost sale for Motorola - as my first option was a Defy (those phones are cheap and solid and I tend to mistreat my phones, so Defy seemed like a good option, until I found out that unlocking them is a bitch)
- abh1nav 15y ago
  +1 for unlocked phones being the norm. This has been the case in asia for years now. It's about time we catch up.
  - zaph0d 15y ago
    The OP was talking about bootloader unlock and not carrier unlock.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - uniclaude 15y ago
    Your vision of Asia seems to exclude Japan.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Carrier lockdown only happens when you buy a phone under contract. You can buy unlocked phones, easy. But they are so expensive!!!! Well, yeah, that's because you're paying the real price, not a subsidized price. When you're paying the subsidized price, IMHO you have less leeway to complain about carrier lockdown.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      Well, just for the record, I bought a heavily subsidized Galaxy S sim-unlocked with a 2 year contract (the cost was something like $30). Gave it to my wife, then bought myself a SG II. And I'm happily paying for my contract btw. The carrier I'm talking about is a smaller one from Europe. It's unthinkable to ask this of Vodafone or Orange (the 2 big ones) since their heads are really up their buts. And the unlocking prices they charge are freakin` insane! It's not as if carriers can't do this, they just don't want to. I really don't understand what's their problem. If I'm terminating my contract I have to pay the phone's subsidized price for the months remaining, their only loss is me as their customer, so WTF is the deal with sim-locked phones? I hate it when companies, instead of pleasing customers, are innovating in better lock-in methods. But yes, I was talking about bootloader-unlock in my previous message. Really, Nexus S is the best Android sold right now, unfortunately it was only available from Vodafone and I'll never make a contract with Vodafone again.
blakerobinson 15y ago
Unlocked bootloader is awesome. I would have settled for just being able to turn off Sense at this point.
daimyoyo 15y ago
Now that HTC has committed to removing locked bootloaders, it's only a matter if time before all other android handset makers have to follow suit. This is a very good thing for the cellphone industry, and tech in general.
kragen 15y ago
I'm glad they're doing this, but it's sad that it's news. We ought to be able to take for granted the freedom to run whatever software we want on the computers we buy. (Don't tell me a cellphone running Android isn't a computer. You know better.)
- nitrogen 15y ago
  You know it's a computer, and I know it's a computer, but to the "average person," it's an appliance. It's kind of like the electric motor. Someone (sorry, I don't recall who) recently posted an analogy here on HN between electric motors and any other technology. At first, factories would install a single giant motor with belts running everywhere, and Sears sold a general-purpose home motor. Eventually, motors were miniaturized and specialized into all kinds of devices. Now nobody thinks about using a motor; they think about using a lathe, blender, or sewing machine. The same trend is happening with computers. Initially, people had generic computers (ignoring the anomaly of the standalone word processor). Increasingly powerful computers are gradually getting built into everything. You and I see computers everywhere, but everyone else just sees smarter devices.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Motors cannot control computers. Computers can control motors. Motors do not require an operating system. There is something else that bothers me with this analogy... The computer (as the 'average person' uses them) is a synergistic experience between both the hardware AND the software. Without the software, it would be useless. Without the hardware, the software would be useless. For the motor analogy, I assume the motor is the hardware, and the belts are the OS? Motive power and computer power are 2 different things.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      Yes, I wanted to point out the critical difference that software makes, but my post was already getting long enough. The average person doesn't (yet) seem to understand that difference though.
  - 15y ago
Splines 15y ago
I once had an HTC HD2, and while WM6.5 wasn't very good, the xda-developers community loves this device. I was able to try out all sorts of Android builds on this device, as well as getting WP7 sort-of working on it. Truly amazing. My only gripe was that it was built with TMO in mind, and didn't have the right radio to talk 3G on AT&T. The battery didn't last too long either, but it was user-replaceable, so not that big of a deal.
- ableal 15y ago
  The HD2 came out 18 months ago, and is still near par to current hardware (1GHz, WVGA, etc.). I've been testing these XDA Android releases: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=957652 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=957652 ; I get standby battery drain of 1% / hour, which is about the same as the original WM6.5.
Luyt 15y ago
"There are four major stakeholders in the Android smartphone market: the cell carriers, the consumers, the handset makers, and Google. The carriers want smartphones to be locked-down carrier-controlled devices through which customers obediently buy services on carrier terms. All the other stakeholders, by contrast, gain from unlocked devices. Consumers win because they’re not limited to what the carriers choose to provide them; handset makers win because an unlocked phone is more valuable to a consumer than a locked one (and a little less expensive to ship, too); Google wins because its long-term strategy requires it to commoditize the carriers into a passive channel between the customers and Google." More at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3285 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3285
- gonzo 15y ago
  where is the fking downvote button? ESR-hole knows nearly nothing about the smartphone market. And until last week, he didn't know that the iPod Touch would run apps.
  - eru 15y ago
    We value polite conversation here.
- zrgiu 15y ago
  actually, with the new features in CM7, I don't think Google will like the unlocked phones that much. Users can now simply reject the 'networking' permission and.. bye bye advertising :-)
forkqueue 15y ago
Too late for me - I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 instead of an HTC Sensation precisely because of the locked bootloader.
dochtman 15y ago
I just hope they will allow the Sensation to be unlocked -- or release a SKU that comes with the ability to unlock it.
gst 15y ago
The unlocked and unbranded HTC Android phones that I bought so far did not have any locked bootloader. E.g., on my HTC Wildfire there was some kind of engineering bootloader preinstalled. Carrier-branded HTC phones are locked down, but IMO that's OK and I have no problem with that as long as I have the choice to buy and use an unbranded phone.
silon 15y ago
Perhaps it's time to upgrade my HTC Hero (rooted, of course)
- darklajid 15y ago
  Hero user here: You mean that particular phone that they threw on the market and neglected ever since, right? I do like these steps in the right direction, but HTC won't win me back for a long while after receiving my (pre-ordered, one of the first in DE) Hero and waiting ages to receive any updates/support on it afterwards. It was more or less dead on arrival and really only usable because of the fine folks over at VillainRom.
tytso 15y ago
One of the things that I find really cool about this is this happened without using a copyright license (i.e. GPLv3) as a bludgeon to force HTC to do the right thing. This was done using simple market forces, and not the anti-Tivo clause of the GPLv3. Which has been the Linux kernel developers' objection all along to the GPLv3....
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
GrandMasterBirt 15y ago
I hope this will be retroactive to older htc devices like the EVO. Would be really nice to just not have to hack anything and just get CM7 working on the phones. I am an unlucky one with HTC EVO hardware rev 3 which has problems when flashing a kernel, murders battery life until a full restore is done.
martythemaniak 15y ago
That's great. HTC is going to be shipping unlocked bootloaders, SE has committed to allowing users to request an unlock code for all new/current devices and the Samsung Galaxy S 2 comes unlocked. Motorola probably won't be able to resist the pressure. Seems this will be standard for android devices very soon.
grantjgordon 15y ago
Wow, it's about time!!

402 points by drivebyacct2 15y ago

After much consumer push back against locked bootloaders in new devices, HTC has (apparently) decided to discontinue the policy. This arrives just after Motorola makes some unsubstantiated comment about reconsidering the policy. For some history, the Droid 1 was very open and easy to flash with custom ROMs. It's European brother, the Milestone, featured on-chip security that verified the signature of the bootloader which in turn verified the signature of various boot files including the linux kernel at the heart of Android. Subsequent Motorola devices in the US featured similar security and thus do not have official CM7 builds. HTC recently adopted a similar strategy with respect to some of their more recent phones. The Thunderbolt had a buggy implementation though, and was still hacked quite quickly. The Evo 3d (And another? maybe?) featured a fixed version that more closely represented the impenetrable Motorola style bootloader. Anyway, it appears now, that they maybe embracing the community more, which makes me happy. My mom won't stop talking about how fast her Droid OG is. I put CM7 on it which includes Gingerbread... a treat her phone would have never otherwise seen. Meaning it also includes a fix for an awful race condition that can make it impossible to answer phone calls. Good stuff all around. Also, for context, this is the statement Motorola made a month ago: http://ausdroid.net/2011/04/27/confirmation-motorola-to-unlock-bootloaders-for-future-android-devices/ http://ausdroid.net/2011/04/27/confirmation-motorola-to-unlo... They make very specific caveats for "where carriers allow it".

ZoFreX 15y ago
I'm a Milestone user and long-term customer of Motorola... I can't recommend against them enough. Their problems extend far beyond locked bootloaders, far more than following HTC on this issue would be required for Motorola to be worth dealing with.

rbranson 15y ago

More reasons HTC is my favorite phone manufacturer right now. After a bike accident left my Nexus One screen broken, $100 and a 4-day turnaround got me back on my feet. Thrilled. Maybe they'll drop the Sense UI from the stock phones. One can dream.

joelackner 15y ago
when htc improves their battery life (as far as the manufacturer can do) they'll be tops in my book.
- blakerobinson 15y ago
  I had a pretty sweet extended battery for my Incredible thing lasted for well over a day with heavy voice and data usage. Sure it's not a fix from the manufacturer, but it worked out pretty well.
  - copper 15y ago
    > lasted for well over a day I've never had the spare money to buy a smartphone, but isn't that /ludicrously/ low? My cheap little nokia brick lasts (under normal usage) for a bit less than a week. Admittedly, the power drawn is not comparable, but I'd still think the manufacturers would try to give the users a somewhat longer battery life.
    - mceachen 15y ago
      It's not comparable at all. Every smartphone I've had (Palm Treo, Nokia, iPhone 3G, and now Droid X) has needed daily charging. The Droid is down to ~50-60% battery by the end of the day, unless I'm on the phone a lot. It's not a PITA to plug it in before I go to sleep. These things are full-on computers, in your pocket. Woot!
    - biafra 15y ago
      My Motorola Milestones battery lasts 3 days if I switch off mobile data (CM7). SMS and calls are still coming in.
    - merijnv 15y ago
      Not really, no. I had one of the original iPhones and with heavy 3G usage the battery drains like nobody's business (it barely lasted half a day if I used it to stream music on the train to work). Right now I have a HTC Dream (also known as the G1) which lasts slightly over a day. Newer iPhones and Androids seem to last a bit longer, but not much. Its the price you pay for internet connectivity...

runjake 15y ago

This is great news. The HTC CEO made a pretty quick and sudden decision. Meanwhile, Motorola vaguely semi-committed months ago and nothing has happened. I don't really buy that carriers are demanding this as Samsung currently doesn't do this.

drivebyacct2 15y ago
AFAIK The SGII is open, but I had heard rumors a while back from people I trusted that Samsung was headed in a similar direction. There's no reason to believe it, and with HTC taking a stand I'm hopeful.
rodh257 15y ago
I remember Paul Obrien tweeting that the GSII was really open, seemed to actively encourage modding. Twitter search is horibble so I can't find the tweet now though.
- nfriedly 15y ago
  Just so you know, twitter's search only goes back a limited amount of time because its targeted at real-time results, not historical. Google with site:twitter.com might get better results.

bane 15y ago

Well, now I know who I'm buying my next phone from.

jeffool 15y ago
A million times this. But really, I probably wouldn't even consider it if the phones didn't have extra programs on them that ran pointlessly and/or I couldn't uninstall.
- minalecs 15y ago
  well the whole point of having an unlocked bootloader is so it makes it easier to run custom roms. Most roms are aosp or stock that remove all the crap.
  - jeffool 15y ago
    Oh I get it. I just mean that, if it didn't have that stuff, I wouldn't be too concerned with running a custom rom, and the bootloader wouldn't be as big an issue.

akent 15y ago

Why was this announced via a post on Facebook? Don't they have a corporate blog or something?

blakerobinson 15y ago
HTC is a Chinese company, so even if there is a corporate blog, it's not directly hitting English speaking users. HTC probably saw this as its most direct path to that audience.
- bmunro 15y ago
  Taiwanese, to be precise.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

bad_user 15y ago

This is exactly what I've been talking about -- customers want unlocked phones, and because with Android competition is tough, sooner or later unlocked phones will be the norm. Maybe not just yet, as I don't believe HTC or Motorola until I see it, but soon. I just bought a Galaxy because SG phones can be easily unlocked. That's a lost sale for Motorola - as my first option was a Defy (those phones are cheap and solid and I tend to mistreat my phones, so Defy seemed like a good option, until I found out that unlocking them is a bitch)

abh1nav 15y ago
+1 for unlocked phones being the norm. This has been the case in asia for years now. It's about time we catch up.
- zaph0d 15y ago
  The OP was talking about bootloader unlock and not carrier unlock.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- uniclaude 15y ago
  Your vision of Asia seems to exclude Japan.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Carrier lockdown only happens when you buy a phone under contract. You can buy unlocked phones, easy. But they are so expensive!!!! Well, yeah, that's because you're paying the real price, not a subsidized price. When you're paying the subsidized price, IMHO you have less leeway to complain about carrier lockdown.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Well, just for the record, I bought a heavily subsidized Galaxy S sim-unlocked with a 2 year contract (the cost was something like $30). Gave it to my wife, then bought myself a SG II. And I'm happily paying for my contract btw. The carrier I'm talking about is a smaller one from Europe. It's unthinkable to ask this of Vodafone or Orange (the 2 big ones) since their heads are really up their buts. And the unlocking prices they charge are freakin` insane! It's not as if carriers can't do this, they just don't want to. I really don't understand what's their problem. If I'm terminating my contract I have to pay the phone's subsidized price for the months remaining, their only loss is me as their customer, so WTF is the deal with sim-locked phones? I hate it when companies, instead of pleasing customers, are innovating in better lock-in methods. But yes, I was talking about bootloader-unlock in my previous message. Really, Nexus S is the best Android sold right now, unfortunately it was only available from Vodafone and I'll never make a contract with Vodafone again.

blakerobinson 15y ago

Unlocked bootloader is awesome. I would have settled for just being able to turn off Sense at this point.

daimyoyo 15y ago

Now that HTC has committed to removing locked bootloaders, it's only a matter if time before all other android handset makers have to follow suit. This is a very good thing for the cellphone industry, and tech in general.

kragen 15y ago

I'm glad they're doing this, but it's sad that it's news. We ought to be able to take for granted the freedom to run whatever software we want on the computers we buy. (Don't tell me a cellphone running Android isn't a computer. You know better.)

nitrogen 15y ago
You know it's a computer, and I know it's a computer, but to the "average person," it's an appliance. It's kind of like the electric motor. Someone (sorry, I don't recall who) recently posted an analogy here on HN between electric motors and any other technology. At first, factories would install a single giant motor with belts running everywhere, and Sears sold a general-purpose home motor. Eventually, motors were miniaturized and specialized into all kinds of devices. Now nobody thinks about using a motor; they think about using a lathe, blender, or sewing machine. The same trend is happening with computers. Initially, people had generic computers (ignoring the anomaly of the standalone word processor). Increasingly powerful computers are gradually getting built into everything. You and I see computers everywhere, but everyone else just sees smarter devices.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Motors cannot control computers. Computers can control motors. Motors do not require an operating system. There is something else that bothers me with this analogy... The computer (as the 'average person' uses them) is a synergistic experience between both the hardware AND the software. Without the software, it would be useless. Without the hardware, the software would be useless. For the motor analogy, I assume the motor is the hardware, and the belts are the OS? Motive power and computer power are 2 different things.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    Yes, I wanted to point out the critical difference that software makes, but my post was already getting long enough. The average person doesn't (yet) seem to understand that difference though.
- 15y ago

Splines 15y ago

I once had an HTC HD2, and while WM6.5 wasn't very good, the xda-developers community loves this device. I was able to try out all sorts of Android builds on this device, as well as getting WP7 sort-of working on it. Truly amazing. My only gripe was that it was built with TMO in mind, and didn't have the right radio to talk 3G on AT&T. The battery didn't last too long either, but it was user-replaceable, so not that big of a deal.

ableal 15y ago
The HD2 came out 18 months ago, and is still near par to current hardware (1GHz, WVGA, etc.). I've been testing these XDA Android releases: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=957652 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=957652 ; I get standby battery drain of 1% / hour, which is about the same as the original WM6.5.

Luyt 15y ago

"There are four major stakeholders in the Android smartphone market: the cell carriers, the consumers, the handset makers, and Google. The carriers want smartphones to be locked-down carrier-controlled devices through which customers obediently buy services on carrier terms. All the other stakeholders, by contrast, gain from unlocked devices. Consumers win because they’re not limited to what the carriers choose to provide them; handset makers win because an unlocked phone is more valuable to a consumer than a locked one (and a little less expensive to ship, too); Google wins because its long-term strategy requires it to commoditize the carriers into a passive channel between the customers and Google." More at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3285 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3285

gonzo 15y ago
where is the fking downvote button? ESR-hole knows nearly nothing about the smartphone market. And until last week, he didn't know that the iPod Touch would run apps.
- eru 15y ago
  We value polite conversation here.
zrgiu 15y ago
actually, with the new features in CM7, I don't think Google will like the unlocked phones that much. Users can now simply reject the 'networking' permission and.. bye bye advertising :-)

forkqueue 15y ago

Too late for me - I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 instead of an HTC Sensation precisely because of the locked bootloader.

dochtman 15y ago

I just hope they will allow the Sensation to be unlocked -- or release a SKU that comes with the ability to unlock it.

gst 15y ago

The unlocked and unbranded HTC Android phones that I bought so far did not have any locked bootloader. E.g., on my HTC Wildfire there was some kind of engineering bootloader preinstalled. Carrier-branded HTC phones are locked down, but IMO that's OK and I have no problem with that as long as I have the choice to buy and use an unbranded phone.

silon 15y ago

Perhaps it's time to upgrade my HTC Hero (rooted, of course)

darklajid 15y ago
Hero user here: You mean that particular phone that they threw on the market and neglected ever since, right? I do like these steps in the right direction, but HTC won't win me back for a long while after receiving my (pre-ordered, one of the first in DE) Hero and waiting ages to receive any updates/support on it afterwards. It was more or less dead on arrival and really only usable because of the fine folks over at VillainRom.

tytso 15y ago

One of the things that I find really cool about this is this happened without using a copyright license (i.e. GPLv3) as a bludgeon to force HTC to do the right thing. This was done using simple market forces, and not the anti-Tivo clause of the GPLv3. Which has been the Linux kernel developers' objection all along to the GPLv3....

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

GrandMasterBirt 15y ago

I hope this will be retroactive to older htc devices like the EVO. Would be really nice to just not have to hack anything and just get CM7 working on the phones. I am an unlucky one with HTC EVO hardware rev 3 which has problems when flashing a kernel, murders battery life until a full restore is done.

martythemaniak 15y ago

That's great. HTC is going to be shipping unlocked bootloaders, SE has committed to allowing users to request an unlock code for all new/current devices and the Samsung Galaxy S 2 comes unlocked. Motorola probably won't be able to resist the pressure. Seems this will be standard for android devices very soon.

grantjgordon 15y ago

Wow, it's about time!!