I'm not sure that it's established that people will actually buy smartphones for that reason. Take webOS which you could put into dev mode (essentially rooting

I'm not sure that it's established that people will actually buy smartphones for that reason. Take webOS which you could put into dev mode (essentially rooting) by entering the Konami code (upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart ). Didn't seem to do them a bit of good. So easy rooting may be a desirable feature but doesn't seem to sufficient feature to ignore other more important features.