Droid X actually self-destructs if you try to mod it
mobilecrunch.com
As an Android advocate/fan this _really_ rubs me the wrong way.
mobilecrunch.com
DIY/Makers and anyone else who ends up repairing fancy devices (phones, after market stereo head units, various lab equipment) have constantly fought with this type of thing. It comes in forms of bios that self destruct, glue that's only purpose is to break something internal if a panel is removed, or tamper proof screws on replacement parts.
See the Makers "Bill of Rights" - http://cdn.makezine.com/make/MAKERS_RIGHTS.pdf (pdf). I tend to judge companies on whether or not their products are outright MADE to prevent me from being able to fix it myself. If I can't, I won't buy products from them again. As @meunierc said, "vote with your dollars."
Motorola has actually been honest enough about this to tell you to buy from someone else.
The Moto decision is just a tiny thing that probably won't affect much in the grand scheme of things. I just have an issue with the fundamentals. It's a hot button issue for me. ^_^
It makes no good sense for Motorola to burn cash on making their phones harder to hack when they don't need to - it's only managerial paranoia that leads to this, as best I can tell.
Companies like Motorola know most of their customers are apathetic to the needs of hackers and look to the bottom line. Apps will still run on the phone, so customers will still have that. This is a win for Motorola in the market they serve.
The best reasons I've read for why Apple is so hard on jailbreaking is (a) carrier agreements not liking unlocks and (b) pirating of apps. I find these reasons a bit more compelling, although like I said I'd like to see more information about it.
What you mean by "ease of repair"? How is the ROM getting busted up that you need to reflash the phone?
A company that creates a device and directly states "buy something else if you want to modify this" probably didn't make that power connector a replaceable part because it was "easier to just affix it with 2cm of glue."
It's a fundamental issue with the attitude MOTO is presenting.
In all likelihood, Junior is going to throw the phone away and get an ad-subsidized Droid 7 for free. Let's face it, all of this hardware is disposable now. Ask your local VCR repairman.
why do you think throwing away, rather than improving, something that so much energy, material and other resources went into creating, is a good idea?
I don't get how the NES was designed for "maintainability" or "longevity" while the XBox was not. They're both disposable consumer products.
i replace devices when they are no longer of use to me, or if something significantly more useful comes along. actually useful not hype.
i got my current phone in 2005: i only have one phone, and this phone works well. i've repaired this phone: a year ago it fell in water and stopped working so i stripped it down, cleaned it up, checked for obviously blown circuits, replaced bits until it worked again.
Needless, they lost a couple hundred devices sold because of that.
EDIT: I know most here will get it but this drives me crazy because it stifles progression. Did Motorola every think that their next best engineers might be the kids that are so passionate about this stuff that they want to tinker with their phone in these ways?
Bootloader signing, though annoying and, I think inappropriate for a manufacturer to do is non-destructive. Intentionally bricking a phone is another thing entirely: it's vandalism.
BTW, Brazilian law mandates unlocked/unlockable phones and subsidies are just as present.
This. I was really excited about the way that the N1 was sold; unfortunately it seems they aren't going to continue sidestepping the carriers.
And that tells a lot about how much consumers really control their relationship with their suppliers.
It's a lot like Microsoft. They don't sell Windows to Joe Sixpack. They sell it to Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer.
If users modify their phone, they could possibly escape the locked-down universe this maker has created, and therefore metaphorically short-circuit revenue stream plans.
In short, it's about control. Manufacturer control of the user, but not user's control of the device. (Note I deliberately said "user" not "owner" since I believe that best reflects the viewpoint of the manufacturer.)
"Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years."
It's really depressing :(
"The current theory being put forth by the non-alarmists in the Android hacking community suggests that the DROID X is locked in a similar manner to the Milestone. Though it may be difficult to crack, and may lead to many hairs being pulled out, mucking with the bootloader probably won’t brick your phone."
[0]http://www.droid-life.com/2010/07/15/enough-with-the-efuse-t...
[1]http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/15/reality-check-modd...
from the source, the things checked before blowing the fuse are: "the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version"
it seems like if you get any kind of corruption, in any part of the above components, for any amount of time, your phone becomes a brick.
corruption happens: my previous phone was a motorola. i stopped using it because it would randomly redirect phone calls to other numbers in the phone book (but it was usable for a long period despite this).
motorola phones' get corruption (which keep essential functions working), but now any temporary, minor problem results in permanent, intentional bricking.
Now I'm considering the Nexus One, but then I wonder when the Nexus Two might come out? From a hardware standpoint (aside from the 8GB internal storage, HDMI out and bigger screen) the DroidX doesn't look that much better.
Thoughts?
I've been thinking of getting a Nexus One specifically because of FroYo (and its wireless tethering -- which finally puts it on feature parity with my old Nokia E61i), but it's fairly expensive and I'm loath to drop $500+ on something if there's something better on the market or about to come on the market.
According to HTC, Froyo is set for auto-update on the Incredible in Q3 sometime. Or you can just install one of the firmwares that's out on the web and get it today.
Unlimited data on Verizon is awesome btw.
Is this "Motorola stops would-be cell phone hackers!" or "Motorola puts self-destruct sequence in your phone!"?
The bigger issue at hand is that the common hardware hacker is such a rare beast these days...
As a vendor, dealing with hacks, jailbreaks, and other such things is remarkably expensive. Consumers (not developers) wind up installing these things without understanding the implications of what they're doing. The OS breaks, the applications break, things go haywire, things go bad. The hardware vendor, the OS vendor, and the application vendor all take the blame and have to deal with the support costs. We get support e-mails all the time that can be traced to iOS jailbreak-induced issues.
It's a massive pain in the neck that, understandably, a vendor just doesn't want to deal with.
Moreover, as a consumer, it's incredibly wasteful to be spending so much time on trying to break into undocumented systems that the vendors just aren't interested in supporting.
Instead, I want to support vendors that provide more open platforms for a more premium price. It costs more to produce an open, supported platform, and I don't mind paying a little bit for an Android development phone that allows me to experiment with OS-level work, or something like the Ubiquity RouterStation Pro[0] as an alternative to consumer wireless routers. The advantage to me is that hacking the device is supported and I don't have to fight with a consumer manufacturer -- a company with very different priorities to my own -- to do it.
It's one thing to not support the new engine when it has problems. It's another thing to destroy property that someone bought from you after the sale if they use it in a way you don't approve.
I understand it costs more to support an open platform. But it's a choice to support that open platform, and Motorola doesn't have to do that, they can hang up on Joe Average who did installs the mod just like a dealership would do so on anyone who screwed up putting a completely different engine in their brand new car.
Cars aren't phones. The cost of installing a new engine is very different than the cost of installing a phone hack, the set of people likely to do so (and the associated cost to the manufacturer and other vendors) isn't the same, and there's going to be a lot more consumer awareness about what they're doing by replacing the engine. And really -- modern cars are locked down.
I find locked-down devices annoying, but not unethical. Self-destructs are simply vandalism, and should result in legal action.
I'm assuming your main point is the cost of customer contact/handling after they've done something dumb?
As well as the intangible costs of what customers think and say after things go wrong. Look at how Mac application developers respond to things like Usanity's Haxies.
That really doesn't make any sense.
But you bring up an important point. Many (if not most due to scale) of the people who are rooting their phones are not developers/tinkerers. I was talking to a very non-technical person the other day and they said a friend had sent them instructions on how to jailbreak their iPhone. This person just followed the instructions and then was able to download a navigation app for free. Not so much your noble hacker.
Blah blah blah, DRM is bad so people should be able to steal if they want to, I agree with that. But these companies see the same problems the video game companies have seen and attempted to solve with DRM.
It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?
Only if we assume your initial premise. How about this one? The average consumer is never going to try to hack their phone unless someone more knowledgable than them provides the instructions and resources necessary to do it. In other words, average consumer using the phone will never, ever, ever have a bricked phone because of some sort of anti-tampering device.
Motorola wishes to sell a device with a certain set of supported functionality. They do not wish to invest effort in dealing with hacked versions of their devices, and in fact they seem to have contracts with carriers that require them to protect the devices.
Motorola sells you a device that does exactly what they say it does. If you don't like the feature-set of this device, then don't buy it -- Motorola is not required to sell you an open platform and you't not required to buy their closed one.
The number of people that will try to hack it is vanishingly small, but it only takes one.
Once that one person gets their hack working, the number of people that have no idea what they're doing but will still install a hack developed by someone else is surprisingly large.
... "Therefore bricking hacked phones is a good thing" at the end
Therefor, bricking hacked phones is their prerogative, it truly doesn't matter to me or 99.99% of the people buying their devices, and if someone does care, they should buy a device from someone interested in serving the tinkerer market, rather than trying to jury-rig a product from a company that clearly has no interested in supporting your endeavor.
Vote with your dollars.
Where's the outrage now?