Who exactly is enticing these manufacturers to pull this crap? And why exactly am I paying for hardware I'm not given full access to? The PC isn't locked down like this. Neither is the Mac. At what point did device manufacturers decide that you don't REALLY own your device anymore. It would be one thing if I were paying a monthly lease fee on my shiny new G2 and I could trade it in for the G2X when it came out, kind of like my cable modem for my Comcast cable. If it's old, they replace it, if it breaks, they replace it. I can understand THAT device being locked down. They own it.
But you're going to lock down a device I own? A device I spent upwards of $400 on, and you're not even going to let me do what I want with it? I might even be able to cope with this idea if they stated that the cost is upfront for the privilage of connecting with a specific network, but it isn't sold that way. It's sold as a device that you then own. And then, not only are they going to lock it down like crazy, BUT, if you try to alter it outside of factory specifications, they're going to sue you. Reference Geohot and the whole Playstation 3 debacle. That whole thing is no different than these smartphones. You buy the device, but they won't allow you to touch the software.
The US even ruled that it is completely legal to root your phone because... you own it. Carriers and phone manufacturers continue to ignore this ruling and lock things down anyway, probably because carriers are scared they won't be able to control things like advertising, side-loading of applications, and who can tether to the network. Maybe instead of locking things down, they should find ways to embrace people like Cyanogen and the whole crew working on CyanogenMod, or Virtuous or Liquid or whoever the heck is making open source operating software. How hard would it be to put out a Clockwork flashable .zip file that added T-Mobile applications and bloatware, for Verizon to provide VZ Navigator as a separate download, or AT&T to allow side-loading applications (because the only applications people side-load anyway are apps on the Market anyway, just maybe an older version (if you did some QA on Flash I wouldn't have to do that crap Adobe.......)).
I'm operating under the assumption that carriers are pretty much all to blame for this, but maybe manufacturers have something to do with it too. Maybe they want to protect users from destroying their phones. I suppose that's a valid argument, but maybe we could try letting advanced users either call in or go to a specific website to grab a code to unlock the bootloader. You don't need 8 levels of security like Motorola or HTC have been using lately. Certainly the bootloader is enough instead of encrypting the bootloader, recovery, kernel, yada yada yada. They don't just lock it, they encrypt it. How hard can it possibly be to tell a customer that if you unlock the bootloader, you no longer have a warranty? This has to be the carriers fault.
If you like screwing around with your device and you don't want a carrier telling you what to do, do yourself a favor and buy a phone from Sony Ericsson who recently announced they'd be providing unlock codes on their website for users that wanted them (unless a carrier complains), or LG because their phones are still easy to unlock.
Motorola has been on the dark side since the original Milestone and everybody with a Droid X from a year ago still doesn't have full root. HTC, starting with the G2 has started getting nasty. They're encrypting the bootloader, locking the eMMC, encrypting the recovery. Half the reason people bought HTC phones was because you could root them easily. They're going to ruin that very soon here.
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