Motorola Says eFuse Doesn't Permanently Brick Phones

radicalpi writes "Motorola has responded to claims that eFuse is designed to brick your device if you attempt to mod it or install unauthorized bootloaders. Yes, the device will still not operate with unauthorized software, but it will only go into recovery mode until you reinstall the authorized software. According to Motorola: 'If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed.'"

Comments

Re:Permanently brick sort of like permanently dead

[mlts]

This sounds exactly like it is on the CLIQ. In the past, if you were not careful with modding, you will end up with the phone bootlooping until you put the phone in USB recovery mode, and flash a signed SHX file. Now, you can most likely use nandroid and pull back to the last backup.

This bit people big time when a new radio ROM was available for upgrading, and people upgraded to it with a rooted/custom ROM, one had to reflash (losing root). Of course new ROM fixed the RAMDLD exploit that was used to root the phone in the first place.

Luckily, on the CLIQ, there was a ROM that had ro.secure set to 0 that was signed by a vendor. This allowed for a recovery image to be flashed, and new ROMS pushed to the phone. Had this not been the case, I'm sure it would have been an uphill battle to get the phone re-rooted, and likely people would have moved on to other platforms and not bothered.

All and all, this isn't great news, but it is better than having devices be rendered unusable until sent to a Motorola repair depot.

Re:Permanently brick sort of like permanently dead

[Kenja]

Funny... cause the USB cable is in the box the phone came with.