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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

The catch is you probably cannot root it.

ZTE has gotten VERY good at locking down their phones, the bootloader checks and undoes root and the kernel seems to detect attempts otherwise.

For me, non-root is a showstopper.

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If they are preventing you from loading your own software, in my mind that lends credence to the idea that ZTE has some sort of spying capability (beyond the usual smartphone spying capabilities) that they really don't want to lose.

Perhaps that's why they're so cheap - their cost is subsidised by the listeners?

You know, 3 years ago I would have called that paranoid. Now? Not so sure.

Police state 3.0

But holy crap that's a good theory. I'd be really interested in the actual demographics of who is buying which phones.

Implying that the Chinese are any more likely to be listening to the world's communications through their phones than the Americans are likely to be through their phones is farcical.

I'm not saying it can't be both. But American companies already own the mobile operating system space. If we're owned by the US, it's likely there. And those companies are most likely but playing ball with the Chinese as nicely as they ate with the Americans. And that's why backdoors built into Chinese hardware for Chinese spies seems at least plausible to me.

The ZTE Blade was _the_ goto phone for price-to-power-to-rootability (absolutely trivial to root).

Then the follow-up, the ZTE Skate started their trend of fiendish difficulty to unlock.

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