Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Couldn't this be some sort of unfair business practices? I mean, if Microsoft made it so that only Microsoft approved programs could run on windows, they would be sued in a heart beat, what makes this different?
Just because you have discovered an unbricking technique does NOT invalidate the fact that it WAS in fact bricked.
Bricking is not defined as forever.
Bricking means the device is hosed and cannot be recovered without breaking in and modifying the hardware.
Breaking into the JTAG interface of a consumer device and reprogramming PROM are definitely hardware modification techniques that are non-trivial.
This is another term that has entered the popular lexicon and got warped. If a device is bricked, _no one_ can reactivate it - it is dead. If someone can revive the device for a fee, it's not bricked.... it's just something you probably should not have bought in the first place. Bricked means bricked - and I've had a few devices go that way on me because of mistakes.
How naive can you be ?
Suing IS the only option. Any individual consumer boycotting a product will do nothing, because they don't care about individual users ... this is why they're quite happy to deal with your "customer service" requests by letting you talk so someone in Mumbai reading from a checklist of approved questions but offering no real answers.
Any percentage less than a certain amount are also "don't care" metrics, it simply won't make a dent on their overall sales, and is not cost effective enough to affect a recall or revision to the product.
But a court case, together with it's bad publicity and public perception that the company isn't being totally honest, WILL have the CEOs taking notice, and might just change something to the benefit of all users.
You are one of nearly seven billion people on the planet ... no one cares what you boycott or otherwise, no one will even know about it. Make a class action suit, and entire countries can hear about it on the six o'clock news.
This is basically what the nexus one does. You can unlock it, but it voids your warranty, and adds an unlocked padlock icon to the boot screen to show that you have unlocked it.
it's not Google's fault that Motorola is so blatantly circumventing the spirit of the OS
I disagree. Maybe at the beginning Google had to bow to phone manufacturer's wishes, but I think it is popular enough now that they can add a few more requirements in return for getting all the Google apps. For example:
* You have to provide Android upgrades for a year after the EOL of the phone.
* You can unlock the bootloader in the same way as the nexus one (but it can void the warranty).
* You have to provide a non-skinned ROM option.
* The phone has to pass some kind of conformance test. Maybe they already do this, but it's clearly not a great test if the they do; e.g. most phones don't support call recording, behave very differently when they are sleeping, and so on.