HTC’s G2, a new smartphone from the Taiwanese manufacturer, is apparently roofproof, and resists attempts to jailbreak the system’s operating system. When the G2 detects that you’ve tried to unlock the software so that you can add custom apps, a special chip reinstalls the stock Android software that shipped with your phone, effectively undoing your modifications.
While it makes sense that the folks in T-Mobile support don’t want to contend with an almost infinite variety of custom software installs on their phones and the problems they might present, the fact remains that there’s a hardware-based rootkit to prevent you from making software changes to a phone you own.
The Android operating system is given away for free by Google under the terms of the Apache license, and it seems against the idea of the Apache license to restrict phone owners’ ability to chose what version of Android they run on their phones.
If you’re interested in the tome-length blow-by-blow account of the folks at XDA Developers trying to unlock the G2, be sure to check out the XDA forums.
[Via MobileCrunch]
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